Images and visual perception have become the new method of transmission and sensory perception. They have led to a form of high speed receptivity. These floods of images do necessarily lead to better clarity and understanding, but may contibute to more superficiality. Chinese art critics at one time viewed popular culture as a weapon to fight the official ideology. Yet, they underestimated this point.
Pop culture is a double-edged sword.
While pop culture goes a long way to undermining official ideology, it also neutralizes culture, even the individual itself. Particularly, the emphasis that pop culture puts on visual perception in the end leaves people afloat in a sea of images with little time to make value judgements. For young artists awash in these images, many have resisted the pressures and chosen to work to restore a sense of the personal over the popular. Wang Yanru shows a strong concern with the potential relationship between public and individual experience by re-contextualizing food advertisements, which represent both an idealized sense of sight and taste. The re-contextualized images, even though they retain their original color, nonetheless cause the viewer to forget, even if only temporarily, the once perfect sights associated with these savory things and to recall the cruel cutting, dicing, squeezing and pulling that they had to go through before the aesthetically pleasing end product.