Wang Guangyi

Private Collection, New York

Colours: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality s much brighter and the more vibrant with the navy blue tending more towards royal blue and the yellow towards lemon yellow. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is extremely light wear to all four outer corners. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Wang Guangyi's career-defining Great Criticism series provides a potent analysis of the cultural shift in Chinese contemporary culture as the East-West divide began to dissolve during the early 1990's. First exhibited at the 45^th Venice Biennale in 1993, the juxtaposition of revolutionary socialist realism alongside Western super-brands creates an irresistible contrast that is both bold and yet filled with subtlety. The function of a logo is to refine an image to the extent that it is universally recognisable across cultural and language barriers, a semiotic absolute perhaps most elegantly embodied in the Coca Cola logo, the original emblem that inspired the series: "I put the can [of Coca Cola] down to turn a page and suddenly, I found that the posturing of the soldier-peasant workers against the Coca-Cola logo made strong visual sense. The more I looked the more intrigued I became. In content and style both graphics are the product of two very different cultural backgrounds, and each totally embodied in its own fantastic kind of ideology." (K. Smith, Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in China, Zurich 2005, p. 61)

Of all the movements of the 20^th Century, Social Realism, both Soviet and Chinese, refined the interpretative singularity of an image to its ultimate degree. As a result we see here combined two antithetical absolutes undone by a simple juxtaposition. Unlike conventional examples of dynamic communist workers designed as tools to inspire revolutionary fervour, the increasing infiltration of major Western brands into Chinese society has meant that it is no longer clear whose side of the propaganda divide the artist is on. The artist succeeds in forcing the viewer to re-evaluate images that we take for granted and in so doing reveals new truths about what they represent. By allowing the concepts of Marxism and Capitalism to co-habit in the pictorial space he points to a future in which the polemic dogma of one can be reconciled with the other. This painting therefore represents a bravura performance from an artist prepared to tackle complex social issues in a concise and aesthetically dazzling manner.