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Sunday 16 February

Wang Guangyi: The Icon Saboteur

Published on: 3 January 2025

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 6 minutes

Wang Guangyi transforms Cultural Revolution propaganda images into a biting critique of Western consumerism. His works reveal how two seemingly opposing systems—Chinese communism and capitalism—employ similar mechanisms of social control.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: There is something magnificently subversive about Wang Guangyi, born in 1957 in Harbin. This Chinese artist, who lived through the Cultural Revolution firsthand before becoming one of the biggest names in contemporary Chinese art, plays with our certainties like a cat with a ball of yarn. But beware, it’s no innocent game—it’s a surgical dissection of our collective illusions.

Take his “Great Criticism” series, his most famous work. Here is an artist daring to take Cultural Revolution propaganda images—those posters that brainwashed millions of Chinese—and make them copulate with Western luxury brand logos. The result? A visual orgy where Rolex, Cartier, and Coca-Cola dance a perverse waltz with the workers, peasants, and soldiers of the Maoist era. It’s brilliant, provocative, and a slap in the face for those who think art should be as smooth as their bank accounts.

Wang isn’t here to please us. He’s here to show us how two seemingly antagonistic systems—Chinese communism and Western capitalism—are, in reality, two sides of the same coin. Two systems of control, two machines producing desire and obedience. It’s Walter Benjamin meeting Andy Warhol in a Beijing karaoke bar, and the result is as fascinating as it is unsettling.

Look at how he treats communist propaganda heroes in his paintings. These monumental figures, once symbols of proletarian revolution, become the unwilling mannequins of a dystopian fashion parade. The raised fists that once held the Little Red Book now point to luxury brand logos. It’s a transformation that would have made Mao scream and Guy Debord smile. Wang understands that the society of the spectacle has no ideological boundaries.

Make no mistake: Wang is not a mere provocateur recycling images for shock value. His work is rooted in deep reflection on the nature of power and the manipulation of the masses. When he overlays the BMW logo on a propaganda poster, he doesn’t just create a striking visual contrast. He shows us how the mechanisms of seduction and social control have adapted to the era of global capitalism.

Wang maintains a productive ambiguity. His works are neither a celebration of triumphant capitalism nor nostalgia for the Maoist era. They occupy that uncomfortable space between the two, like a visual Zen kōan refusing to provide a simple answer. This is precisely what makes his work so relevant in our era, where ideological certainties crumble like houses of cards.

Let’s take a moment to discuss his “Materialist” series, where he transforms propaganda figures into monumental sculptures. These works are a conceptual tour de force that would have thrilled Theodor Adorno. Wang takes the two-dimensional icons of socialist realism and gives them an imposing physical presence, creating palpable tension between ideology and materiality. These sculptures don’t represent individuals so much as the physical embodiment of faith in ideology—a faith that, according to Wang, is the main source of people’s strength.

What’s fascinating is the way Wang manipulates visual codes with Swiss watchmaker precision. The numbers appearing on his paintings aren’t arbitrary decorative elements—they reference the licenses required during the Cultural Revolution to produce and distribute images. Every detail in his work is laden with meaning, like a conceptual time bomb waiting to explode in the viewer’s consciousness.

The red dominating his paintings isn’t the joyful red of Coca-Cola ads but the blood-red of revolution, the red of Mao’s Little Red Book, the red that stained modern Chinese history. When Wang uses this red as the background for his compositions, he creates a visual stratification where the different layers of Chinese history overlap and contaminate each other.

Critics accusing Wang of selling out to the art market completely miss the point. His commercial success isn’t a betrayal of his artistic principles—it’s living proof of the relevance of his critique. The fact that his works sell for millions at auction is merely the final act of a conceptual performance that began decades ago.

The ultimate irony is that collectors scrambling to buy his paintings for astronomical sums become unwitting actors in a critique of the system they represent. It’s like Marx selling stock in his own image—a contradiction that would undoubtedly amuse Wang.

What truly makes the artist unique is his ability to transcend mere social commentary to reach something deeper, more universal. His works don’t just speak about China or capitalism—they speak about the human condition in an era of mechanical reproduction of ideology. Walter Benjamin would have recognized in Wang’s work the “loss of aura” he theorized, but pushed to its extreme in a world where political and commercial icons have become interchangeable.

The way Wang treats human figures in his works deserves particular attention. His characters are not individuals but archetypes—the worker, the peasant, the soldier. They are depicted with the same graphic rigidity as the commercial logos they are juxtaposed with. This dehumanization is not accidental—it’s a biting critique of how ideological systems, whether political or commercial, reduce human beings to symbols, to interchangeable units in their grand propaganda machine.

Wang’s genius lies in his ability to use the visual weapons of his adversaries against them. He takes propaganda techniques—repetition, monumentality, simplification—and flips them inside out to expose their emptiness. It’s an act of conceptual judo that turns these systems’ strength into their weakness.

The artist has understood something essential: in our contemporary world, propaganda hasn’t disappeared—it has simply transformed. Revolutionary slogans have been replaced by advertising slogans, proletarian heroes by Instagram influencers, but the mechanisms of social control remain fundamentally the same. It’s this troubling continuity that Wang exposes in his work, with chilling precision.

His decision to stop the “Great Criticism” series in 2007, when he felt its international success risked compromising its original message, reveals a rare artistic integrity. In a world where too many artists are willing to endlessly reproduce their successful formula, Wang chose to preserve the meaning of his work rather than exploit its popularity.

Today, as we witness a new cultural and economic cold war between China and the West, Wang’s work resonates with striking relevance. His paintings are not relics of a bygone era but visual prophecies anticipating the tensions of our present. He understood, long before many others, that the real battle would not be between communism and capitalism but between different versions of the same system of control and mass manipulation.

Wang Guangyi is not so much a political artist as a philosopher who uses art as his medium. His work is a visual meditation on power, ideology, and the manipulation of the masses, echoing the reflections of thinkers like Michel Foucault or Jean Baudrillard. But unlike these theorists, Wang doesn’t just analyze these mechanisms—he stages them in a visual theater where the viewer is both witness and participant.

The next time you see an ad for a luxury product or a political propaganda campaign, think of Wang Guangyi. He has given us the conceptual tools to understand how these images work, how they manipulate us, and perhaps how to resist them. It’s a legacy worth far more than the millions his works may fetch at auction.

Reference(s)

WANG Guangyi (1957)
First name: Guangyi
Last name: WANG
Gender: Male
Nationalitie(s):

  • China

Age: 68 years old (2025)

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