Huang Zhuan Visual Political Science: Another Wang Guangyi ang Guangyi has always held a special position in contemporary Chinese art, one that stems from his inherently contradictory nature. Though his Great Criticism Wartworks will never again provide us with the visual shock that they did in the early 1990s, we cannot deny that these images—or, more accurately, his handling of these images—once precisely expressed the contradictory experiences we were having at the time: from indescribable belief to angry deconstruction, from the mettle of heroism to the fashionable pandering of consumerism, from grave criticism of international political relations to nationalist catharsis. He reveled in continuously creating visual suspense, but before we had time to guess the answer to the riddle, he would destroy it. In terms of art history, he counts as an artist who is full of power yet remains unfathomable. The Misread Great Criticism From art criticism to mass media, from art history to the art market, Wang Guangyi has always been seen as a poster boy for Chinese pop art. This classification can be traced back to the First Guangzhou Biennial, Oil Painting of the Nineties, held in 1992. At that exhibition, he won the highest academic award, the Document Award, from Chinese art critics for his Great Criticism artworks. The award comments read: In Great Criticism, familiar historical forms have been deftly linked to what were once irreconcilable popular contemporary icons, sending a hopelessly tangled metaphysical problem into suspension. With the language of pop art, the artist has opened up a contemporary problem: so called history is a linguistic prompt that connects with contemporary life; Great Criticism is one of the best examples of such a linguistic prompt to arise in the early nineties.1 While this was a somewhat sketchy appraisal, it was following the After ’89 New Chinese Art Exhibition held in Hong Kong in 1993 that the title “political pop” was unequivocally bestowed upon the Great Criticism series. Li Xianting, who coined the term political pop, describes it thus: Since 1989, many representative figures of the ’85 New Wave Movement successively discarded their metaphysical stances, and, without consulting each other, all started to walk the path of pop, most of them deconstructing the most influential subjects and political events in China in a humorous manner.2 He believed that for the then-current Chinese deconstructionist culture, political pop was identical to “cynical realism,” except that the former found its inspiration from “reality within the broader social and cultural frame,” and the latter “more from an experience of the reality pertaining to the self and its immediate surroundings.”3 Wang Guangyi’s 1989 Mao Zedong and 1990 Great Criticism series came to be seen as the representative works for this style of painting. 6 In 1992, Western art magazines such as Flash Art and Art News gave prominent coverage to Great Criticism, which led to Wang’s inclusion in the Cocart International Art Invitational held in Italy and the 45th Venice Biennale. Since then, political pop as represented by Great Criticism not only became the main reference point through which Westerners came to know contemporary Chinese art, but also became the main critical field through which to judge the success or failure of Wang Guangyi’s art. Critics felt that “this artwork, in terms of art, is just a low value double copy,” reflecting the notion that “as China passes its political peak and moves towards its economic peak, the impetuous creative state of artists is the illness of the period where our history develops into a commercial society.”4 Another criticism was that political pop pandered to America’s Cold War strategic need to suppress China.5 Thus, Great Criticism became famous because of its affiliation with political pop, but it inevitably paid the price of such fame through a misreading based upon an old methodology. One could venture that this classification and critique of Great Criticism mostly results from displacing Wang Guangyi from the developmental logic of his own art history, as well as removing him from the specific context of modern Chinese art. In an article discussing the cultural development and emergence of Chinese pop art, I proposed that: The pop art that arose in postwar America had two backgrounds, one in cultural history and one in art history. The former refers to the nourishment it gained from the mass popularization and utilitarian aesthetic pedigree of American culture, and was also a physical reaction to the fragmented, superficial, and sensory consumer culture that emerged after World War II. The latter refers to the refutation of elitist strains of modernism such as abstract expressionism. Warhol’s visit to China in the early 1980s, and, more importantly, Robert Rauschenberg’s solo exhibitions in Beijing and Lhasa in 1985, kicked off the spread of American pop ideas in China. This moment just happened to arrive at the peak of China’s ’85 [New Wave Movement], which was marked by themes of enlightenment and rebellion. It was this set of circumstances that produced such a bizarre shortfall in meaning: pop was lackadaisically understood to be a Dada-style destructive kind of art, and its deconstructionist underpinnings were poorly understood. For political reasons, Chinese society quickly completed its transformation from an enlightened culture to a consumer culture in the early 1990s, and Chinese artists, still stuck in a tragic mood by the failure of cultural enlightenment suddenly realized that they were buried in a completely unfamiliar economic world. The loss of ideals and the death of the critical identity left their thoughts in a chaotic mixture of modernist enlightenment construction and postmodernist deconstructionist concepts, which made pop a natural stylistic choice for the period. Of course, this choice was based on a clear misunderstanding of pop: it was both seen as a weapon of critique and used as a tool for deconstruction. Early Chinese pop art clearly contained mutations that were wholly different from Western pop ideas. First, the appropriation of readymade images was “historicized” and definitely not limited to that which was “current.” This differed markedly from the “random” or “neutral” image selection method in the West. Second, the linguistic strategy of “removal of meaning” was replaced by an attitude of rearranging meaning as a result of the abovementioned appropriation method. This formed the most bizarre and contradictory semantic and cultural traits in Chinese pop art: it deconstructed the original images by reconstructing the meaning of the image, and it removed the cultural burden through a culturally 7 Wang Guangyi, Solidified Arctic Region, 1985, oil on canvas, 150 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist. critical attitude. It was because Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism rearranged the highly different images of Chinese political history and Western consumer history that [his work] produced a new form of critical power.6 Obviously, without acknowledging the dual nature of the cultural qualities in Chinese pop art and seeing it only and simply as a direct product of Western modernism, it would be difficult to make faithful judgments about its logical relationship to the cultural enlightenment and social criticism of the 1980s. For a time, in the early 1980s, Wang Guangyi was a utopian, believing that a healthy, rational, and strong civilization could save a culture that had lost its beliefs. His early artistic activities with the Northern Art Group, and his early series Solidified Arctic Region, displayed a passionate and delusional pursuit of culture that was marked by order, succinctness, and coldness. This idealized approach was quickly replaced by a strongly analytical form of image making, and in his Post-Classical series, which he began in 1987, he discarded his humanist sentiments and used a method of revising the images of Western art history to carry out his project of “cultural analysis” and “schematic critique.” If we say that in Black Rationality and Red Rationality, the subject of analysis was still limited to classical art and literature, then it was with Mao Zedong AO that he first began using political images as material for analysis. Maybe we shouldn’t take too much stock in this term analysis, because the marks and letters Wang Guangyi applied to the surface of the leader’s image were not truly the result of analysis, nor did they indicate any political standpoints or attitudes. They had only one function: to break away from the established expectations of significance and aesthetic judgment that people had towards these kinds of political images. In 1989, Wang Guangyi classified the images, concepts and methods that he produced during this period as a “clearing out of humanist passions.”7 We can understand this as a desire to maintain tension between abstract and hollow humanist passions and a cold, rational attitude critical of socialist realism. It should be pointed out that during this period, whether he used classical art 8 Wang Guangyi, Red Rationality: Revision of the Idols, 1987, oil on canvas, 120 x 150 x 3 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Wang Guangyi, Mao Zedong AO, 1988, oil on canvas, 120 x 150 x 3 cm. Courtesy of the artist. and literature, or political images, it was mainly directed at the deficit of meaning created by the universal humanist passions of the ’85 New Wave Movement; he was not taking a “political” stance, and it was wholly unrelated to the pop strategy of deconstructing the meaning of images, even though it made use of readymade images. Wang Guangyi once described his motives behind using political images such as that of Mao Zedong: I had wanted to provide a basic method for clearing out humanist passions through the creation of Mao Zedong, but when Mao Zedong was exhibited at the China Avant/Garde exhibition, observers multiplied the humanist passions by a hundredfold to imbue Mao Zedong with even more humanist import.