Contemporary Chinese Artists, Still on the Rise
Tags: Communism, Creativity, Freedom, Art, China

Contemporary Chinese Artists, Still on the Rise MutualArt Follow Dec 2 · 5 min read

Wang Guangyi, Yue Minjun, and Zhang Xiaogang reflect on the era when Maoist propaganda dominated the visual landscape, as they construct fresh visions of their own.

Pamela Kanner /MutualArt

Yue Minjun, Red Boat — Planche №6, 2009. Lithograph available for sale at MutualArt. Contact roni@mutualart.com

Ai Weiwei routinely makes headlines with his record-breaking sales and political activism. Far from an anomaly, his success reflects the steady emergence of contemporary Chinese artists onto the global market during recent decades.

Exploring these artists’ growing market appeal reveals the distinctive sociopolitical climate in which they came of age and how it shaped their identities. Works by Beijing-based artists Wang Guangyi, Yue Minjun and Zhang Xiaogang embody a synthesis between Western modernity and the aftershocks of Mao Tse Tung’s regime which restricted free artistic expression.

Mao’s Cultural Revolution initiative, launched in 1966, sought to preserve Chinese communism and establish extremist Maoism as China’s leading ideology. The movement prohibited art deemed anti-communist or anti-Mao as well as traditional techniques such as ink painting. Artists who resisted were subject to harassment and sometimes even torture. Propagandist art dominated, mainly oil paintings disseminated as posters, used to glorify the regime and provide the public with visual fodder of a flourishing socialist state.

Wang Guangyi, Time. Lithograph available for sale at MutualArt. Contact roni@mutualart.com

Bathed in communist red, also a conspicuous color in the Chinese tradition, the posters were often filled with young, lively people delighting in their great ruler’s magnificence. Their imagery’s prevalence persisted beyond Mao’s regime, even as artists regained freedom of expression under Deng Xiaoping, whose rise to power in 1978 drove the country toward industrialization and globalization.

Wang Guangyi’s style draws directly on Maoist propaganda. Born in 1957 in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, he witnessed the political and cultural upheaval of the ’60s and ’70s, laboring as a railway worker in a nearby village before attending the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts.

Wang dispels the Cultural Revolution’s visceral brainwashing power in his compelling Great Criticism series. He blends heroic Maoist imagery with well-known consumerist icons and a Warhol-esque treatment, a style often described as Political Pop. Wang’s juxtaposition between socialist symbolism and Western advertising highlights the subliminal power both ideologies hold, depicting a narrative of how one replaced the other in China.

Wang Guangyi, Mao Zedong : №2 of Red Box, 1989. Lithograph available for sale at MutualArt. Contact roni@mutualart.com

Wang based his Mao Zedong : №2 of Red Box on the standard portrait of Mao, once an omnipresent feature of every Chinese citizen’s life, which served to elevate Mao to iconic status. Wang’s bold red lines bring to mind the grid system used by Renaissance masters to accurately render models’ proportions, simultaneously distancing artists from potentially seductive, often nude models. By applying the grid to Mao, Wang similarly dissociates himself from Mao’s cult of personality. At the same time, he breaks up the venerated figure into smaller chunks, each insignificant on its own.

Yue Minjun was born in 1962 in Daqing, Heilongjiang, where his family worked in the nearby oil fields. He is responsible for one of the most recognizable images of contemporary Chinese art — ‘that laughing face.’ It is maniacally jubilant, gleefully oblivious, caught in a moment of laughter yet eternally, perhaps obediently, frozen in time. Its closed eyes are blind to reality, mouth agape in helpless abandon. Yue’s laughing face, based on his own self-portrait, functions as an enigmatic symbol and common thread in his work.

Yue Minjun, Mushroom cloud, 2008. Lithograph available for sale at MutualArt. Contact roni@mutualart.com

Yue’s Mushroom Cloud features a row of identical laughing faces, a unified bubblegum pink-hued mass oblivious to the ominous, swelling mushroom cloud forming above. The cloud’s shape closely resembles China’s first atomic bomb test explosion in 1964, which inaugurated the country as a global nuclear power. In invoking the nuclear test, Yue underscores his laughing subjects’ blindness to the political climate ‘exploding’ in their midst. On the other hand, Yue’s subjects implore, perhaps ignorance is bliss?

Critics often associate Yue with the Cynical Realism movement, a genre characterized by a humorous, ironic approach to China’s radical transition to industrialization and modernization. Yue’s style indeed treads a fine line between cynical and light-hearted, between morbid and playful.

Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodline: Big Family, 2006. Lithograph available for sale at MutualArt. Contact roni@mutualart.com

A breakthrough star at auction, Zhang Xiaogang was born in 1958 in Kunming, Yunnan Province. At one point, his parents were taken away by Maoist authorities to be “re-educated” for three years. Zhang earned broad acclaim for his triptych The Dark Trilogy: Fear, Meditation, Sorrow, which in 2011 set a record for the highest price paid for a contemporary Chinese artwork, selling for $7 million at auction.

Zhang set another record in 2014 with the $12.1 million sale of Bloodline: Big Family №3. The artist’s belated discovery of old family photographs led him to create the Bloodline series, a surrealist reimagining of the type of family portrait common in China during the ’50s and ’60s. Zhang masterfully transforms the medium of photography into painting and exposes the era’s forced uniformity. The figures’ polished faces and empty gazes peer eerily out at us, calm yet unsettling, hiding a mysterious past.

Zhang Xiaogang, Tiananmen, 2007. Lithograph available for sale at MutualArt. Contact roni@mutualart.com

Zhang and his contemporaries grew up in a world where art and politics were closely bound. The era’s ramifications were difficult to entangle, as art schools continued to teach socialist realist style for several years afterward. After years of restriction and isolation, beginning in the ’90s, contemporary Chinese artists have emerged dramatically onto the international stage. The recent market boom, at first mainly driven by international collectors, is most recently led by Chinese buyers who command the top lots at auction.

In an open, globalized China, artists meditate on the reverberations of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. While these artists were once prescribed a strict visual iconography, today they reflect on that era to form powerful narratives of their own.