Wang Guangyi b. 1957

each signed in Chinese, dated 96.12 and numbered 1-30 respectively on the reverse

Schoeni Art Gallery, Hong Kong

8+8-1, Selected Paintings by 15 Contemporary Artists, Schoeni Art Gallery, Hong Kong, 1997, p. 116

Generally in excellent condition. Some with very minor abrasions in the corners.
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Painter Wang Guangyi is the purveyor of Pop in Chinese contemporary art. Balancing nods to Cultural Revolution-era Communist propaganda posters with the very real consumerist impulse that drives many aspects of contemporary China's booming economy, he creates images that in many ways become emblematic of a society that grapples with the past as it strives for the future. By combining brand name logos as diverse as Christian Dior and Louis Vuitton with stoic portraits of laborers and farmers from decades past, Wang becomes a cultural mediator who uses the visual lexicon of China past and China present to make poignant reflections on the here and now.

 

It is easy to draw parallels between Wang's body of work and that of the American Pop artists active in the 1960s, a time of incredible economic growth for the United States, not unlike the never-before-seen leaps and bounds with which China's economy currently expands. Artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein looked to the realms of consumerism and entertainment for their imagery, painting a Campbell's soup can in the case of Warhol, or making pixilated comic strip-like images for Lichtenstein. These artists read the pulse of the society within which they worked, culling images from their immediate environments and turning them into "high art." It was a revolutionary act in the annals of art history, something that forever changed the way society viewed the otherwise mundane objects and images found in daily life. Wang Guangyi, in much the same vein, also turns to the streets and shelves of China for his pictorial inspiration, combining the old and the new into powerful works that, like Warhol and Lichtenstein, help to change the way those that view his work react to, understand and eventually navigate contemporary Chinese society.

 

The works available here are prime examples of Wang's oeuvre. His 2003 painting No Coke (Lot 10) from the "Great Criticisms" series that the artist has been working on for several years finds three soldiers bundled in winter military dress holding guns, with one pointing off into the distance, a bold black cartoon explosion bubble surrounding his hand as if marking a site of action or violence. As with all of the figures who populate Wang's paintings, these ruddy soldiers are seemingly lifted directly from Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution posters that were plastered near and far in China at the time, celebrating the resilience of farmers, the might of soldiers and the brawn of laborers, all united toward equality and the common good.  Here, Wang seems to empower these characters not with military prowess or tactical skill, but instead with a vision of the future in the form of the most prolific beverage in the world, Coca-Cola. Of course, this is an ironic insertion into the picture plane, Coke being the symbol of America, its freedoms and its ideals. The artist thus juxtaposes the stark realities of the 1960s with the unifying power of the world's most well-known soft drink, and then goes a step further by negating the immediately recognizable Coca-Cola logo that hovers in the center of the picture with a message in the lower right quadrant of the work that says simply, "No Coke."  A most interesting philosophical battle thus plays out here in the form of a semantic play on words.  Should Coke be celebrated or obliterated? By extension, does the victory of Coke mean the triumph of America? Again, history and contemporaneity clash across Wang's painting, reflective as it is of the realities of China today and its struggle to negotiate the past with the future.

 

The other work included in this sale, Passport (Lot 9), is a massive grouping of 30 canvases, each of which measures 20 by 16 inches. Installed in three rows of 10 paintings each in a horizontal formation that extends 14 feet across, the work titled Passport is from 1996 and features a grand assortment of male and female laborers, several powerful fists and eight canvasses that spell out the word "passport" in two segments in the middle and bottom rows.  It is important to note that several of these powerful hands are clenching fountain pens, in the place of what we might expect to be a gun or a plowshare.  By empowering these disembodied hands with mighty writing implements, Wang posits that language trumps muscles and weapons, that the written word is what ultimately emerges victorious.  The term "passport" also hints at a certain sense of empowerment, in that the bearer of a passport has the ability to travel, and thus to move beyond his or her immediate surroundings onto the global stage. In many ways, this work is a perfect example of China's gradual transformation over the past four decades from a society steeped in Communist ideals and global isolation into a major world player whose reach extends to all corners of the globe.

 

It is that very China, international, cosmopolitan and constantly growing, yet still firmly rooted in days past that Wang Guangyi captures in his powerful works. It might be said that his paintings display the growing pains that his homeland is going through as it transitions from a once-insular society into an economic giant that the world looks to for not just cutting edge technology, architecture and artwork, but also for a sense of how the rest of the 21^st-century might play out. As a Pop artist representing his generation, Wang's take on the current conditions of China might tend toward the sarcastic or critical—is capitalism truly superior to communism? In the end, are the iconographies of Maoist propaganda really that different from the logos and brand names of the consumerist present? Wang continually makes us question the power of images and language and how they define our lives.  In the case of China today, we might say that a new visual language has emerged in the form of Chinese Pop, a dialectical arrangement that captures not just the immediate, but a past that proves difficult to fully depart from and move beyond.