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- 1. Pop and Propaganda - Chinese posters and Wang Guangyi
- 2. THE PAINTINGS OF WANG GUANGYI: REVOLUTIONARY ACTS?
Pop and Propaganda - Chinese posters and Wang Guangyi
Written by Ashley Rawlings
29/06/2006
So what's left of Chairman Mao's communist legacy in a country that is hurtling into a new capitalist age? How is this being reflected in contemporary Chinese art and design? These questions have been on my mind since going to see the exhibition of Chinese propaganda posters at Gallery TOM in Shibuya. The images, made between the late 1950s to the 1980s, are so arresting, so over the top: people waving guns and flags in the air, striding around, saluting, chests thrust out - this is some serious nation-building being depicted!
The strength of their design, as well as their historical worth has not gone unrecognized: the posters on display in this exhibition are all from a private collection. But while they've become collector's items, it's not to say that they are entirely consigned to history. Seeing this exhibition instantly made me think of Wang Guangyi, the Chinese contemporary artist whose work shows the strongest influence from this design heritage, and so I thought it would be interesting to compare the two.
Bold outlines divide the yellow of the foreground from the red background, giving form to striving, workers who thrust their arms into the air. Their faces are filled with determination: they are ready for self-sacrifice for the greater good... or are they? Am I talking about the picture on the left or on the right? In Wang Guangyi's work, the workers are surrounded by the logos of Western designer names and brands: Coca-Cola, Volvo, Disney, Chanel, Marlboro, Kodak, TIME and Carlsberg. Is this what contemporary China is striving for?
So how does the history of the Cultural Revolution intertwine with Wang Guangyi's Great Criticism series? Wang was born in 1957, the year before Mao declared a start to the Great Leap Forward (1958 - 1962) which aimed to bring China's agriculture and industry up to western levels of production. This period is viewed both within China and elsewhere as something of a disaster, and it was with the aim of reinvigorating the socialist revolution that Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution (1966 - 1976). Wang Guangyi grew up in the two decades when the propaganda poster thrived.
One aspect of the poster campaign was to create a cult of personality surrounding Mao. His omnipresent image is the first thing you notice when you go into the exhibition at Gallery TOM. Usually painted in red or warm tones, Mao was portrayed as a noble man of the people, visiting factories and talking with workers and peasants. If the sun isn't already radiating out from behind him, then it seems to beam out of his very face!
The Communist Party employed China's best artists and designers from before the founding of the People's Republic to produce the propaganda posters, and for a long time they were very successful. The posters were cheap and easy to produce and the strong visualization of abstract ideas worked well in a country where many people were illiterate at the time. People were also pleased to have more color to liven up otherwise drab surroundings and the images spread into homes as well as workplaces, journals and magazines.
Wang Guangyi went to art school in 1980: four years after Mao died and just as the Communist Party effectively declared an end to the Cultural Revolution. Deng Xiaoping was opening China up to the West, introducing market reforms which led to a gradual improvement in quality of life. The design of propaganda posters changed in order to reflect this new reality: they no longer had the serious, militaristic feel of the previous decades but took on themes like education and hygiene.
The design then started to resemble Western advertising: the colors became softer and the outlines of figures more gentle, particularly with the portrayal of women. More and more people were shown as wearing Western clothes or having Western haircuts. When I look at these posters and their slogans I can't help but think of 1960s American TV commercials: the kind where you have a housewife in a yellow and white checkered apron telling us with a pearly-white smile, "You'll stop paying the elbow tax when you start cleaning with Ajax!"
But these new posters were still a form of propaganda; they still put the emphasis on the moral virtue of production as a way of contributing to the state, rather something for personal pleasure - seriously, have you ever been 'mobilized' to plant trees? Increasingly the posters came across as old-fashioned and lost their popularity. As the art market became less and less regulated by the government, artists moved on to develop their own form of expression, rather than the government's.
This change made it possible for Wang to produce works towards the end of the 1980s which questioned the customary portrayal of Chairman Mao. He took images of the former leader and overlaid them with a grid of thick, black lines, substituting the normally warm reds for cold, bluish greys. He literally put up a barrier between Mao and the people, forcing viewers to take a new look at the image that had been regarded by so many as god-like.
Even now, a huge portrait of Mao hangs over the main entrance to the Forbidden City in Tiananmen Square, and in the middle of the square (upsetting its Feng Shui) is his mausoleum, where you can see his embalmed body if you're willing to queue for long enough. I stood in that queue for about two hours in the sweltering heat of August last year, and in the end, like everybody else, I only got to see Mao's waxy body for ten seconds. And yet thousands of people do this every day.
Inside the hall, the atmosphere is reverential, as though you're visiting a church and you're not allowed to talk, take photographs or have bags with you. It's a bizarre set of contradictions: the government has distanced itself from Mao's policies ever since his death and yet doesn't go so far as to erase his image completely. Meanwhile, the people of China increasingly crave a capitalist lifestyle and yet they will come from all over the country to see Mao's body. Wang Guangyi was brave to question Mao's official portrayal only ten years after his death, when to do so could - and still can - potentially cause so much offence.
Wang began his Great Criticism series of large-scale paintings in 1990, taking socialist and consumerist iconography and bluntly jamming them together. The works, painted in oil on canvas, are not as large as advertising billboards but by being on average two meters tall by two meters wide, they have a commanding presence. They are generally painted in the blocky style of the earlier posters from the 1960s, but sometimes the outlines appear more faded than the originals, implying the passing of time. At times Wang also changes the color scheme altogether, using greens or blues, giving the images even more of a 'Pop' feel to them.
He also covers the works in hundreds of little numbers in repetitive sequences, like barcodes or serial numbers - perhaps a reminder that his art is a product which needs cataloguing. In an interview with Charles Merewether, he explained that the central point he wants to express is "the ideological antagonism that exists between western culture and socialist ideology. The significance of this antagonism has more to do with issues in cultural studies than simply art in and of itself."
For Wang Guangyi, growing up during the Cultural Revolution with such powerful poster design all around him meant that visual art and social issues were inseparable. He doesn't look back on the Cultural Revolution as either a 'good' or 'bad' thing, but rather as something "meaningful" which provided a "visual modality" for him to work with. That visual modality has changed completely as China has become the last great untapped market for Western companies. Meanwhile, the younger generations of Chinese people crave Western goods and designer brands as much as their Japanese counterparts. By 1995, a nationwide consumer survey showed that Coca-Cola is the most famous and admired company in China.
Brand names such as Coca-Cola and Marlboro have become, as Wang puts it, "highly socialized" in China, and it is the materialism that they represent which carries the most significance, "because the term is almost revolutionary, at least in China. From as far back as I can remember, materialism and idealism were opposites, antonyms, even antagonistic."
Materialism, or the desire for commercial success is no longer seen as contradictory to artistic merit, especially for Wang Guangyi. Born into a poor family, he initially fulfilled the cliché of being a struggling artist, but now, like many other artists of his generation, he has joined China's growing class of nouveau riche. For Wang, the rich nations' romanticization of the passionate but penniless artist was not something to aspire to; having experienced the reality of poverty for himself, he aimed not just to be an artist, but a rich artist. This seemed to work out rather well, since Chinese contemporary art is in high demand at the moment. More and more galleries introducing Chinese artists are popping up and while the value of the works increases all the time, it is still generally less expensive than Western art. 90% of buyers are from America, Europe or Japan.
Apart from issues of disposable income, what is it about Chinese contemporary art that appeals to non-Chinese buyers? In Wang Guanyi's case I suspect it's because his paintings are open enough to interpretation to appeal to a broad range of art lovers. By putting together two sets of imagery that are instantly recognizable as Chinese and Western, they work at the most raw visual level: you don't need to be an expert on China to understand what's going on here. But the more people know about China, the more they can read into the work.
More recently, Wang has shifted the focus of some of the paintings from brand logos to the names of artists like Warhol and Beuys, who he says had a huge impact on him. Chinese artists have often faced the criticism that they are merely imitating the ideas and techniques of Western artists. I don't think this accusation makes sense: it doesn't matter what techniques Chinese artists use, they are addressing issues which face Chinese society. And given that Chinese society is 'westernizing', isn't it appropriate for them to refer to Western art and design?
It remains to be seen what Wang Guangyi will do next and where contemporary Chinese art will go. The Chinese contemporary art scene essentially pivots around the semi-industrial area of Danshanzi in north-eastern Beijing and the Moganshan Road area of converted warehouses near Shanghai Station, but these communities of galleries, artists' studios and shops are both at risk of corporate redevelopment.
For the time being, with the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the Shanghai World Expo in 2010, the Chinese government recognizes that in order to be considered a world class host of international events, they need these cultural areas, so their future appears to be safe for the time being. But even if they should close down, there is no doubt that artists like Wang Guangyi will continue to find ways of showing their work and expressing their views about their rapidly changing society.
Source: www.pingmag.jp - "Pop and Propaganda - Chinese posters and Wang Guangyi"
THE PAINTINGS OF WANG GUANGYI: REVOLUTIONARY ACTS?
The paintings of Wang Guangyi belong to the category of Chinese contemporary art termed Political Pop: work that appropriates the visual tropes of the propaganda of the Cultural Revolution, reworking them in the flat, colorful style of American Pop. To understand the works of artists engaged in this practice, it is important to recognize the significance and specificity of the images they are using to fashion their work. Without this knowledge, the work of artists like Wang Guangyi may be reduced to a mere aestheticization of the experiences of the Cultural Revolution, a view which threatens to limit the discussion of these works to their formal elements, foreclosing more important ideological and historical questions that must be raised.
It is perhaps equally essential, particularly for Western audiences, to keep in mind the dominance that the Maoist regime held over visual culture and artistic production in China from 1949 to 1976, a control that reached a near totality between 1966 and 1972, during the Gang of Four's reign. Certainly, the vast legacy of propaganda that resulted from this period will continue to impact artists interested in critically examining China's recent visual history. After all, these images were more than simply popular; for a time, they were the only ones allowed.
During the mid-1990s, as China's rapidly changing economic system transformed to accommodate the demands of the global marketplace, a rush of luxury goods became available to newly wealthy developers and entrepreneurs. In Wang Guangyi's The Great Criticism series (1998), the artist responds to the influx of a new visual regime: those advertising images promoting newly available, high-priced commodities. In the resulting oil paintings, Wang stages conflicts between classical figures of propaganda and the onslaught of luxury consumer goods entering China. In the first propaganda image below, three heroes of the revolution seem to be manning the front lines of ideology, as Chairman Mao floats above them like a benevolent and watchful god. From left to right the costumes of these three identify them as an industrial laborer, a soldier in the People's Liberation Army, and a farmer-examples of "red" people, proletariat who would pave the way for the future.
The caption below captures the ferocity of their revolutionary zeal: "People around the world, unite! Abolish American Imperialism! Abolish Soviet Reactionaries! Abolish Counter-revolutionaries throughout the country! " The intense animosity of this trio is harnessed and redeployed by Wang Guangyi in The Great Criticism [BMW] (1998), in which the same three figures look defiantly out toward the future of free enterprise and utter a resounding "No!" But what, exactly, is being refused? What is being criticized?
Similarly, Wang Guangyi's The Great Criticism [Rolex] (1998) appropriates the image of a Chinese ballet dancer, a member of one of the revolutionary dance troops which used a Western dance form, imported from Russia, to communicate tales of revolution to the masses. These troops were very popular at a time when all forms of cultural expression-including Peking Opera and other theatre forms-were re-worked to express Maoist ideology. The text below the dancer reads: "Learn how to act by watching a hero. You must become as strong as that pine tree on top of Titian Mountain." The female counterpart of this figure appears in Wang's The Great Criticism [Rolex] (1998), perhaps displaying her athletic strength and prowess to ward off the appeal of the watchmaker.
It is important to note that there is not a consensus about the critical intent of Wang Guangyi's work. In fact, some critics have been particularly strong in their rejection of his paintings, as well as those by other Political Pop artists, finding fault with the artists for tapping into the manipulative power of propaganda imagery without adequately subverting its meaning. In other words, Wang can be seen as extracting cultural capital from a history of suffering, providing easy answers without asking too many difficult questions. This suspicion is compounded by the fact that the artist's works have become valuable commodities, having circulated perhaps too easily into the Western art market. Critics ask: Isn't such co modification exactly what Wang Guangyi is supposed to be critiquing? Curator and art writer Gao Minglu has expressed these feelings quite strongly:
They [Political Pop artists] have become a part of an upper-middle class in the changing Chinese economy. The artists no longer strive to produce a confrontation with authority and the public as their predecessors did; they have changed from elite/ amateur avant-gardists to professional, careerist artists...the nationalism and materialism of Political Pop, based on the transnational political and economic circumstances, share common roots with government policy, and the art is in a position of complicity.
I respect the demand that a great deal of caution be exercised when tapping into the images of a fascist regime. Still, I can't help but be reminded of the criticism of those Western artists in the 1970's and 80's who, while developing poignant strategies of appropriation and mimicry, were accused of self-exploitation and even pornography.
The value of Wang's works-and others like them-is their ability to resist absolute clarity, instead creating a surprising tension between consumer and Maoist imagery. Without being overly critical-refusing the tactic of direct accusation that often short-circuits more provocative discussion-Wang is able to call into question both the capitalist and communist symbols in his work, allowing us to see them as conflicting and competing precisely because of their mutual insistence on hegemony. In this way, the artist is indicating the uneasy points of confluence between China's Maoist past and its promising economic future. These paintings suggest that resistance or protest in the visual arts is deeply dependent of the cultural context in which works are made. For while Wang Guangyi's works may be read as a critique of China's new economics today, they may have passed-with slight modification-for government propaganda not too long ago. It is precisely this polyvalence in Wang Guangyi's paintings that is their greatest strength.
Source: www.shanghart.com - David Spalding
