Wang Guangyi Research Articles

Twórczość Wanga Guangyi i jej wpływ na rozwój pop-artu w Chinach

Since the late 1970s, profound changes have been underway across all spheres of Chinese society, encompassing the arts, thereby giving rise to new artistic trends and transformative shifts within the entire artistic tradition. Chinese artists have increasingly asserted themselves on the international stage. Concurrently, as the West became intrigued by Chinese art, two prominent trends – political pop art and cynical realism – were notably burgeoning. Notably, political pop art emerged as a foremost artistic movement in China during the early 1990s. Central to this trend is a predilection for symbolism, serving as a conduit for artists to articulate their sentiments and societal perspectives. Wang Guangyi is widely acknowledged as the seminal figure behind this movement in China. This article delves into Wang Guangyi’s creative evolution and the genesis of political pop art, exploring the antecedents of this novel artistic trajectory, its conceptual underpinnings, and stylistic hallmarks.

Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic by Hentyle Yapp

Reviewed by: Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic by Hentyle Yapp Kai Hang Cheang (bio) Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic, by Hentyle Yapp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Xv + 271 pp. $25.60 paperback. ISBN: 9781478011552 Over the past few years, Asian/American cultural criticism has shown a renewed interest in China. Complicating the traditional interpretation of China as a geographical origin point for the Chinese diaspora, the Asian/American scholars behind this twenty-first-century turn to China–including Christopher B. Patterson and Y-Dang Troeung (2019), Nan Z. Da (2020), and Christopher Fan (2021)–attend to how the West's shifting significations of China and Chinese-ness in video games, science fictions, and memoirs reflect the world's imaginations of China's rise in the age of the new Cold War. Hentyle Yapp's monograph Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic imparts further nuance to the topic of China by bringing Asian/ American cultural criticism and transpacific critiques, such as Lisa Lowe's "hesitant method" and Petrus Liu's "material Marxism," to bear on analyses of post-1989 Chinese art and cultural productions to make distinctions between multiple "Chinas." Not to be confused with the two Chinas in Petrus Liu's Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (namely, the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China), "minor China" is "a method that highlights the epistemological assumptions and ontological conditions [which] uphold the order of things, the major" (5), whereas, the major is the short hand for the "major narratives around resistance and romanticized notions of liberal free speech" (1). Per Yapp's characterization, Asian American studies and area studies are among the disciplines that propagate "major China," since they are driven by reading methods informed by liberal ideals like agency and subjectivity, interpretations that the critic argues flatten out subtle nuances in analyses of China. As a corrective, Yapp offers up "minor China," a "molecular" (15) interpretive method that employs fine-grained, affective, and aesthetic approaches which seek not to judge or criticize but to hesitate before, or pause and ask questions of, liberal logics of inclusion that too often value post-Tiananmen art as heroic efforts of aesthetic resistance in the face of authoritarianism. [End Page 111] Yapp exemplifies the problematic liberal logic in chapter 1 as he discusses the way China and Chinese artists were superficially included in Magiciens de la Terre (1989) despite the show's ostensible attention to China when it televised the concurrent Tiananmen Square protests. The chapter then goes on to show how the liberal logic of inclusion distracted Western curators and audiences from noticing the discursive criticisms made by Chinese artists. To make that case, Yapp turns to Cai Guo-Qiang's reproduction of Wang Guangyi's 1965 Rent Collection Courtyard for the 1999 Venice Biennale. Most critics at the Biennale focused on the grimaces on the faces of the workers and therefore framed the exhibition as a critique of socialism. Yapp argues that this understanding of Cai's piece misses a minor remedial detail: the display of the artists crafting the sculptures in front of the audience, an act that re-centers artistic labor in the installation and highlights the value of it under liberal capitalism. Chapter 2 extends the critique of the logic of inclusion by analyzing Ai Weiwei's art project Fairytale (2007). There, Yapp traces the effects of the hostility the group endured from racist Europeans and the anger that some of the tourists expressed (most memorably the Chinese woman who complained about the exclusion of her son from the tourist group because of some anti-police comments that he posted online). The "minor" here means anger and spite, which Yapp reads as affective exhortations that direct readers "to an ethics, practice and method that inquire who might been missing" (101). In chapter 3, Yapp studies Yan Xing's piece Kill (the) TV Set as well as Liu Ding, Carol Lu, and Su Wei's collective curation project Little Movement. Homing in on the "minor" (the dispassionate expression on the face of Yan in his embrace of Agu Anumudu) and ambiguous pieces like 1996.8.26, a work that shows...

Peggy Wang. The Future History of Contemporary Chinese Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. xiv, 254 pp. Hardcover $120, ISBN 978-1-5179-0915-4. Paperback $30, ISBN 978-1-5179-0916-1.

Peggy Wang. The Future History of Contemporary Chinese Art. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, . xiv,  pp. Hardcover $, ISBN ----. Paperback $, ISBN ----. The dissident in post-Tiananmen Chinese art history has been fetishized by the West. Peggy Wang highlights in The Future History of Contemporary Chinese Art that this misplaced attention shoehorns artwork, neglects artistic agency, and ignores how artists in the s responded to a wide swathe of cultural and intellectual dialogues. Addressing this dissident trope, chapter , titled “Spaces of Self-Recognition,” probes art criticism and major debates in the s and uncovers new lines of inquiry that indigenize the understanding of postTiananmen Chinese art history. One debate was the how and why of bridging the distance and differences between contemporary Chinese art and established centers of the art world. Art critics contended that Chinese artists must develop their own standard and objectives. Rather than emulating Western styles and modes of making art, Chinese artists, critics held, should embrace the history and culture of minzu or Chinese ethnicity. “New Realism,” exemplified by the oil paintings of Liu Xiaodong (b. ) and Yu Hong (b. ), gained appeal among critics who found that realist ideology embraces minzu and orients the future of contemporary Chinese art. By focusing on China’s social reality and local environments, Chinese artists, as critics hypothesized, could bring lived experience to the center of their art, embrace contemporaneity without succumbing to Western art, and profess “Chineseness” (p. ) without being fettered to the past. Such direction could make China a new contemporary art center. Pivoting on this sentiment in the art circle in the s, Wang, in subsequent chapters, spotlights five artists whose works have largely suffered from well worn, limited interpretations derived from the dissident lens and explores how they used their works to claim agency in their own world. These five artists are Zhang Xiaogang (b. ), Wang Guangyi (b. ), Sui Jianguo (b. ), Zhang Peili (b. ), and Lin Tianmiao (b. ). Titled “Zhang Xiaogang: Bloodline and Belonging,” chapter  focuses on how the early works in Zhang’s Bloodline series (begun in ) speaks to the artist’s shifting engagement with the world and artistic explorations, as well as an art historical lineage in representing “relationship.” During his study at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in , Zhang’s works were greatly inspired by Review©  by University of Hawai‘i Press European masters, ranging from Michelangelo (–) to Vincent van Gogh (–). In the next fifteen years, Zhang continued to see European masters as “gods” who gave him “encouragement” (p. ). Nuancing the interpretation that Zhang’s early works were simply derivative of Western art, Wang regards the artist’s prolonged self-identification with the Western art tradition and the resulting artworks as illustrations to the artist’s worldly belonging and representations of an art historical relationship. In , Zhang spent three months in Germany, during which he also visited Paris and Amsterdam. Not only had seeing European masters’ works in person, Wang reveals, shattered Zhang’s past understanding of their styles, the artist’s visit to Amsterdam also allowed him to see how van Gogh’s works was tied to his indigeneity to the Dutch landscape, his place of existence. During Zhang’s visit to the exhibition of contemporary art Documenta (Kassel, Germany), he witnessed how the display of art was a de facto capitalist spectacle. These experiences in Europe, as Wang explains, made Zhang reorient the relationship of his art to Chinese history and culture, resulting in works like the Bloodline series. Far from being a protest of socialist suppression, the series, which was based on a set of old family photos, was rather the artist’s deep study of the representation of human relationship. Also, Zhang derived the handling of paint and the anonymity of figures in the series from the calendar posters from the early twentieth century, which, as Wang argues, situated his representation of relationship in an art historical lineage. Titled “Wang Guangyi: Pop and the People,” chapter  challenges the persistent assumption that Wang Guangyi’s works were simply derivative of Western styles and presents the artist’s journey in developing his Mao Zedong AO () and The Great Criticism series from China’s own visual culture and the experiences that...

ZHONG BIAO AND FANG LIJUN'S IMPORTANT APPROACHES IN CONTEXT OF WORK ANALYSIS: CULTURAL CODES AND POLITICAL REFERENCES

The aim of the research is to reveal the prominent cultural codes and political references in the works of Zhong Biao and Fang Lijun. In addition, it is to investigate what are the reasons that push the artists to deconstruction and tragicomic approaches in their works. It is also to understand how the developmental lines of Contemporary Chinese art have developed. Contemporary Chinese art works; Artists such as Yue Minjun, Guo Jian, Wang Guangyi, Fang Lijun and Zhong Biao form the scope and limitations of the research. Include other artists besides Zhong Biao and Fang Lijun; It is to know why contemporary Chinese art produces political and critical works. The problems of the research are as follows: What are the prominent approaches in contemporary Chinese art? What are the reasons for artists to paint political, psychological, tragicomic and critical paintings? How can the prominent cultural codes and political references in the works of Zhong Biao and Fang Lijun be explained? What is the main theme of the Cynical Realism movement? With the answers to all these questions, it will be known how Contemporary Chinese art progresses, and it will be seen what kind of works the artists of this country produced in the face of events. Keywords: Contemporary Chinese Art, Zhong Biao, Fang Lijun, Cynical Realism

Descriptions of the Cultural Revolution in Early 1990s Chinese Film and Painting

This study examines how the Cultural Revolution was depicted in early 1990s Mainland China by analyzing three films and two painting series, which are Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine , Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite , Zhang Yimou’s To Live , Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism Series, and Zhang Xiaogang’s The Bloodline: Big Family series. These works were born against the backdrop of the national rumination on Mao, called MaoCraze. On the one hand, it is noticeable that all these works still maintain a bottom line: they do not attack Mao Zedong personally. This handsomely dovetails with Deng’s early official judgment on the Cultural Revolution and on Mao, as well as the national fondness for Mao of the early 1990s.On the other hand, each director and artist showed different approaches towards the Cultural Revolution. To divide them roughly, three directors described the negative sides of the Cultural Revolution more vividly and strongly than the two artists. Such diversity is an indicator that the PRC had opened a new era, where individual voices were becoming quietly audible. Yet, at the same time, the Party’s prohibition on showing the five works in Mainland China indicates that the government’s control over the arts was still firm and that the Cultural Revolution remained a sensitive issue.

Wang Guangyi e la teologia nell’arte cinese contemporanea1

In the [following] article - an excerpt from the essay Politica e teologìa nell’arte cinese contemporanea. Riflessioni ai margini dell’opera dì Wang Guangyi - Huang Zhuan analyzes Wang Guangyi’s work from the series that made him known in the international contemporary art scene (Great Criticism), up to his latest installation (Things-in-Themselves). By comparing and contrasting his works and Western Pop Art — most notably Andy Warhol’s - while also examining his thought in the light of the Western philosophical tradition, the author defines the peculiar traits and themes of Wang Guangyi’s “unorthodox Pop” and clarifies the core theoretical issues behind it.

Lengzhan yu "minzu guojia jian'gou:" Han'guo zhengzhi jingji fazhan zhongde Meiguo yinsu (1945-1987) (The Cold War and nation-building: America's role in South Korean political and economic development, 1945-1987) by Liang Zhi

Reviewed by: Lengzhan yu "minzu guojia jian'gou:" Han'guo zhengzhi jingji fazhan zhongde Meiguo yinsu (1945-1987) (The Cold War and nation-building: America's role in South Korean political and economic development, 1945-1987) by Liang Zhi Wang Guangyi Lengzhan yu "minzu guojia jian'gou:" Han'guo zhengzhi jingji fazhan zhongde Meiguo yinsu (1945-1987) (The Cold War and nation-building: America's role in South Korean political and economic development, 1945-1987) by Liang Zhi. Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2011. 579pp. In The Cold War and nation-building: America's role in South Korean political and economic development, 1945-1987, Liang uses the perspective of the "Cold War and development," taking the 1945-1987 period of South Korea's economic "take-off" and its process of political democratization as his focus. Liang puts this into context against the grand backdrop of U.S. Cold War strategy towards the Third World, and over the course of six chapters, comprehensively examines the role the U.S. played in South Korea's nation-building process. The first chapter, "America's Cold War strategy in the Third World: politics and economics," discusses American economic and political strategies during the Cold War. Politically, combating communism was the core of America's policy in the Third World within which the U.S. therefore attached great importance to preserving political stability and promoting democracy. Economically, from the Truman to Johnson administrations, America's economic Cold War strategy changed from the indiscriminate promotion of Western-style capitalist economic growth to the pragmatic but all-out support of economic development in the Third World. In this process, the goal of containing communist "economic expansion" did not change. The method with which to contain it, however, did. Chapter two, "Anti-communism and financial aid: America and the division of the Korean peninsula (1945-1948)," discusses American policy towards the southern half of the Korean peninsula from 1945 to 1948. In doing so, one aspect the author discusses is the U.S. repression of the revolutionary passion of ordinary South Koreans, and United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) efforts to support the right-wing, attack the left, and how this— objectively speaking—created the polarization of the South Korean political structure, strengthened the nation, weakened society, and both propagated and implemented American-style democratic thinking. Another aspect was that, in order to combat the spread of disease and famine, the USAMGIK supplied locals with "Government and Relief in Occupied Areas" and, furthermore, implemented land and educational reforms. Further, American and Soviet superpowers did not just use ideological warfare as a way of dividing the Korean peninsula. Instead, in the international context of a Cold War spanning both East and West, the Korean peninsula became a petri dish of sorts for experimentation on capitalist and communist systems. [End Page 226] Chapter three, "From limited containment to absolute containment: America's strategic choices on the Korean peninsula (1948-1953)," discusses American policy towards South Korea from 1948 to 1953. Following the establishment of the Republic of Korea, the U.S. continued to provide it with political, economic, technological and military assistance yet, during the same period, in a move that would prove disastrous, withdrew its troops from the Korean peninsula. In June 1950, war broke out, and America immediately intervened militarily. Throughout the war, the Truman administration's priority was to develop South Korean military strength and win the conflict. As a result, Syngman Rhee took the opportunity to strengthen his dictatorial regime, and American economic support reverted back to the level of emergency relief and aid. Chapter four, "Prioritizing military strength: The extension of U.S. policy after the Korean War (1953-1957)," discusses American policy in South Korea from 1953 to 1957. Following the official launch of U.S. containment policy towards China and the plan to slowly [re]arm Japan, in 1954 the U.S. formulated its National Security Council report no. 5514, formally establishing the fundamental doctrine in its policy towards South Korea of "prioritizing military strength and development." Hereafter, economic development and maintaining a strong South Korean military was, for a time, America's chief objective— followed closely by the promotion of...

China: art now

The Chinese Cultural Revolution hindered the creativity of an entire people for a generation, but with the gradual shift in ideology following the opening of China in the late 1970s, Chinese artists are making their mark on the international art scene. Never has interest in Chinese contemporary art been greater than today, with galleries in London, New York, Paris, Shanghai, and Beijing devoting major exhibits to the work of young Chinese artists. Organized chronologically, Contemporary Chinese Art examines the latest trends in Chinese art - painting, sculpture, photography and film-making - from an altogether novel perspective. This work guides us into thirty studios, including the fascinating workplaces of artists such as Wang Guangyi and Zhang Xiaogang in mainland China as well as US-based Chinese artists, such as the highly-regarded installation artist Gu Wenda. The book highlights not only the artists' governing aesthetics, but also their working procedures and everyday life. Containing texts and bibliographies by leading art historians and color photographs, this is a detailed, scholarly, yet accessible reference guide for anyone interested in the wave of creativity currently sweeping through Chinese art.