Columbia East Asia Review 37
Beyond Pop: Imagery and Appropriation in
Contemporary Chinese Art
Madeleine Boucher, Columbia University
The works of three contemporary Chinese artists, Zhang Hongtu (张宏图),
Sheng Qi (盛齐) and Wang Guangyi (王广义), represent diverse approaches
to many of the same stylistic and conceptual elements that American Pop
art shares, and utilize a vocabulary that is inherently adapted to social and
political critique. These artists mobilize appropriated imagery to subvert and
reinvent the functions of imagery, iconography and authorship. Ultimately,
this article will examine how artists use social critique as a process of selfidentification, and how these artists confront self-expression in their work.1
T
he explosion of contemporary art in China in the past three decades
has included an outpouring of works with close stylistic connections
to American Pop art of the 1960s.2 This paper focuses on three contemporary Chinese artists—Zhang Hongtu , Sheng Qi, and Wang Guangyi—whose
works illustrate the broad creative scope of art produced by Chinese artists in China
and overseas. Their projects should not be read as reinterpretations or conceptual
reworkings of preexisting Western artistic concepts. Rather, these works should be
recognized for their power to transcend and innovate art historical divisions. Each
artist’s approach to the appropriation of imagery varies, from drawing inspiration directly from Pop styles and subject matter, in the case of Wang Guangyi, to indirectly
utilizing a conceptual framework shared with Pop art, in the case of Zhang Hongtu.
This paper analyzes the works of these artists through what I will call the visual vocabulary of Pop art, consisting of a set of conceptual and stylistic elements that I will use
to examine these works through social, political, semiotic and conceptual analysis.
A visitor making even a cursory survey of the major commercial contemporary
art centers in China, 798 and Caochangdi in Beijing and M50 in Shanghai, would
not fail to notice the ubiquitous images of Mao Zedong, the bright, bold colors and
two-dimensional styles favored by so many contemporary Chinese painters. Western
influence, cultural trends and market forces can only explain the phenomenon so far.
The social and political conditions influencing Chinese art in the last two decades
are nearly impossible to generalize simply because of their complexity and diversity.
These conditions might best be understood as a volatile state of rapid transformation that has affected every stratum of society and profoundly changed urban life.
1 Numbers within square brackets in the text of the article refer to images that can be accessed and viewed on our website,
www.eastasiareview.org.
2 American Pop art was an art movement that developed in the late 1950s and continued through the 1960s mainly in
the United States. The movement is characterized by a bold, bright and graphic style that was closely tied to commercial
culture, subject matter that violated traditional artistic ideals (such as household products, comic strips and images of
celebrities), and an interest in breaking down the barriers between popular culture and so-called “high art.” Major figures
of the movement include Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Ed Ruscha.
38 Boucher • Beyond Pop
Needless to say, the social and political conditions of contemporary China have little
in common with those of 1960s American Pop artists. However, the very fact that
artists choose to concern themselves with economic, social, political and historical
issues within a conceptual framework first explored by American Pop art indicates
that there are parallels, perceived or observed, between conditions in 1960s United
States and China today. For this reason, this paper will engage with the Postmodern
theory articulated in the work of Frederic Jameson to frame the individual artist
within a particular socio-political context. Jameson emphasizes that Postmodernism
means nothing more than the era that we perceive ourselves in – one defined by an
interconnected global capitalist economy (in which China plays an increasingly important role) and, most importantly for artistic fields, by a saturation of images and
culture into everyday life. Jameson’s theory focuses on Postmodernism as an attempt
to understand the individual subject. The viewer, then, can understand the creation
of these works of art as a process of self-definition and self-orientation on the part of
each artist.
The goal of this paper is to bring the visual vocabulary of American Pop art
and the paintings of three Chinese artists into conversation, not to draw direct comparisons or contrasts, but rather to examine tropes of the conceptual, political, and
personal in these works of art. I will consider why the visual vocabulary of Pop art,
which designates not only the stylistic and formal components common to works
of Pop art but also the conceptual preoccupations of Pop art, was adopted by these
three painters. I will argue that, like American Pop artists, Zhang Hongtu, Sheng Qi,
and Wang Guangyi all make the incorporation of pre-existing imagery an essential
component of their work. These artists use methods of appropriation that evoke
and alter works, images and concepts essential to Chinese history. Therefore, context
changes the perception of these works and transforms the way that these pieces express an individual position or worldview. I will demonstrate that the vocabulary of
Pop art is inherently adapted to political critique because it introduces ambiguity as
a means of subverting ideology. The flatness that characterizes many of these works
has a concrete conceptual meaning as well—the space in which distinctions reside
literally collapses into the picture’s surface. Flatness has evolved as a conceptual tool
from Modernist painting movements to the flatness of the American Abstract Expressionists.3 Clement Greenberg’s influential essay, “Modernist Painting,” characterizes
flatness as an essential characteristic of twentieth-century painting, and proposes that
the “optical space” of Abstract Expressionism realized the true potential of painting
as a mode of expression. Movements following Abstract Expressionism, especially
Pop art, pushed this flatness to its logical extreme where even “optical space” ceased
to exist, and further developed flatness as a conceptual element.4 I propose that the
analysis of these paintings as symptomatic of social conditions and political context is
not mutually exclusive with viewing them as works of individual expression. Engaging critical sources to guide my arguments, I will evaluate how artists use social cri3 Yve-Alain Bois et al., Art Since 1900, 2 vols., (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 109-110, 440-444
4 Clement Greenberg, Clement Greenberg: Modernism with a Vengeance 1957-1969, ed. John O’Brian, Volume 4 of The
Collected Essays and Criticism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 88.
Columbia East Asia Review 39
tique as a process of self-identification, and how these artists confront self-expression
in their work.
I. Defining The Visual Vocabulary of Pop
Given that it is perceived and constantly addressed in both art and art criticism,
the dichotomy of East and West must be taken into account. I read this dichotomy
as symptomatic of political, economic and cultural pressures, not as a strict divide
that exists in reality, but as a system for understanding two amorphous concepts,
“East” and “West,” by relating one to the other. This dichotomy has been especially
important to Chinese contemporary art from the time when the reopening of art
schools after 1978 sparked the growth of a relatively small, but very active, artistic
community.5 The 1980s saw a younger generation of artists graduating from the
newly re-opened art academies, a generation that grew into a flourishing community
of artists spanning across major urban areas and centering mostly in Beijing. Commercial galleries were few and far between, and most of the exhibition opportunities
available for artists were either informally (sometimes illegally) conducted in public
spaces and in private residences, or officially supplied by the government: China/
Avant Garde in February 1989 was the first national exhibition of contemporary
Chinese art.6 Until very recently, almost all gallery owners, art dealers, and collectors
of contemporary Chinese art were not Chinese nationals. The art movement maintained a complex and constantly shifting relationship with the government. Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) officials alternately supported the development of the arts
in politically acceptable, but not necessarily strictly socialist directions by offering exhibition opportunities and theoretically supporting artistic openness. During periods
of conservative repression, the government sought to control the explosion of alternative ideologies, viewpoints, and critiques that came with “conceptual innovation” (
观念更新, guannian gengxin).7 In the past decades, Chinese artists have traversed the
entirety of Western twentieth century art history, utilizing the visual vocabularies
of Modernism, Surrealism, Conceptual Art, Deconstruction, and Performance Art
in conjunction with tropes more specific to Chinese culture, such as Daoism and
traditional ink painting. As Martina Köppel-Yang argues in Semiotic Warfare, “contemporary Chinese art should not be understood as a copy of Western modernity or
Post-modernity, but… ‘as a set of cultural translations.’”8
The widely accepted breaking point in contemporary Chinese history is the
government crackdown on the student protest movement in Beijing in June 1989.
This perceived rupture was no less influential in the art world. Increased government
pressure on the artistic community finally abated by 1993, and during this period
there was a much stricter divide between art with “official” and “unofficial” themes.9
5 Martina Köppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare: The Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979-1989. A Semiotic Analysis (Hong Kong:
Timezone 8, 2003), 22.
6 Ibid., 62.
7 Ibid., 64.
8 Köppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare: The Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979-1989. A Semiotic Analysis, 21.
9 Melissa Chiu, Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China (New York: Charta, 2007), 25-26.
40 Boucher • Beyond Pop
The government considered Political Pop and Cynical Realism, two movements that
emerged in the first few years post-1989, “unofficial” movements. This label meant
that government support for these unofficial works was denied, exhibition opportunities closed off, and the projects of these artists considered subversive because
they challenged the official narrative and image that the government wished to present.10 While artists continued to take advantage of alternate exhibition spaces, private
homes and publications, the market for contemporary art was only a small fraction
of what it has become today.
In order to clarify how Chinese artists appropriate imagery, Melissa Chiu introduces the concept of “Chineseness” in Breakout: Chinese Art outside China, a study of
Chinese artists living overseas. According to Chiu, these Chinese artists use specifically Chinese iconography to create semiotic links—visual symbols that communicate
an idea—to Chinese culture and history, thereby creating a larger set of meanings
around the idea of “Chineseness.” For example, an image of Tiananmen Square inserted into a painting signals that the subject is Chinese, references the many protests
that have taken place in the square, and carries connotations of Chinese civic life.11
This definition of Chineseness in art reveals that there is a perceived clash between
East and West in the reading, and perhaps the creation, of many works of contemporary Chinese art. Hou Hanru criticizes the two movements that most commonly
use Chinese iconography—including Mao portraits, Communist memorabilia and
Chinese landmarks—for catering to a Western desire to see Chinese artists critiquing
Chinese Communism. Hou implies that these artworks affirm the Western sense of
superiority over the Chinese social and political system because they degrade Chinese
iconography.12
Hou’s critique rightly points out that these symbols of Chineseness are, by
definition, stereotypes designed to evoke broader concepts that are far more difficult
to articulate succinctly. For example, an image of Tiananmen Square can signify the
masses, the student movement of 1989, the Communist party’s authority or any
number of other associations. However, Hou seems to neglect what one might term
the arbitrariness of the sign.13 He labels these icons as stereotypes for the negative
aspects of China in the Western mind alone, neglecting not only the possibility that
Chinese citizens may perceive these signifiers in a similar way to Westerners but,
more importantly, that these signifiers convey different meanings depending on their
context within the work of art. Ferdinand De Saussure points out that the relationship between concrete signs and their signified meanings is never stable even within a
10 Ibid., 26.
11 Ibid., 38.
12 Chiu, Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China, 38.
13 I use the terms signifier and signified as defined in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course on General Linguistics. The
“arbitrariness of the sign” therefore refers to the range of signified concepts to which a single signifier can refer via a sign
within a given language. De Saussure emphasizes that though the signifier/signified relationship is arbitrary, “Among
all the individuals linked together by speech, a sort of average will be set up: all will reproduce – not exactly, of course,
but approximately – the same signs united with the same concepts.” (13). There is a common currency of images and
meanings, a language of iconography that artists draw upon when they appropriate imagery. “Language… is the social
side of speech, outside the individual who can never create or modify it himself… Linguistic signs, though basically
psychological, are not abstractions; associations which bear the stamp of collective approval...” (14–15).
Columbia East Asia Review 41
given language–context, and the evolution of a language over time means that these
relationships are constantly fluctuating. It would be wrong to suppose that the artists did not understand the arbitrariness of the imagery that they employ, and gainfully introduce possibilities for a multitude of signified ideas to which these signifiers
might point. “Chineseness” in imagery allows for a far more complex play of meaning
and interpretation in these works than Hou seems to imply.
From personal observations, I gathered that while censorship and market forces did not affect the proliferation of political themes and images of “Chineseness” in
contemporary artworks, they certainly impacted the introduction of new approaches
to these themes. Who purchases art, where, and at what cost have a notable impact
on the themes that continue to be explored, the styles in which artists choose to work,
and which artists are likely to continue to exert influence through their work. Melissa
Chiu, Martina Köppel-Yang, Alfreda Murck14 and others mark the Asia Society’s
1998 Inside/Out exhibition as the start of Western collectors’ interest in contemporary Chinese art, and credit the exhibition with fueling the rapid expansion of the art
market.15 “Chineseness” sells well, and as Hou Hanru notes, most of the collectors
of these works—in other words, the consumers of these images—are not Chinese.
In recent years, the expansion of a wealthy upper class in China has allowed more
Chinese collectors to enter the market. Though no official data exists to confirm the
trend, most Chinese collectors consistently spend on established names and avoid
taking risks with unknown artists or different styles.16 Market forces encourage stylistic branding and a reluctance to deviate from the most commercially successful
themes and styles. I will return to the topic of stylistic branding in my discussion of
Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticisms series, which exemplifies the tie between economic
conditions, political context, and the potential political meanings of works of art.
To begin the discussion of context and cultural signification, I will first turn
to Zhang Hongtu’s series of three oil paintings, Zhao Mengfu–Monet, noon, Zhao
Mengfu–Monet, morning, and Zhao Mengfu–Monet, evening [1]. Zhang Hongtu is a
Chinese artist who has been living and working in New York City since 1982. These
paintings are part of his continuing project begun in 1998, which he calls Repainting
Chinese Shanshui Paintings, consisting of a series of copies of famous Chinese landscape paintings in the style of three Impressionists and Post-Impressionists: Claude
Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Vincent Van Gogh.17 The Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322)
painting that Zhang Hongtu works from is the ink-on-paper, monochrome black
and white Elegant Rocks and Sparse Trees. Zhang Hongtu created a series of three copies in imitation of Monet’s series of haystack paintings from the Impressionist artist’s
14 Alfreda Murck is a renowned Chinese art historian who works as a curator at the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City
in Beijing. She and her husband, Christian, are long-time residents of Beijing, and actively involved in the contemporary
art community as collectors and friends of gallery owners and artists.
15 Personal interview with Alfreda Murck.
16 Personal interview with Alfreda Murck and Christian Murck, June 2008. Personal interview with Brian Wallace, June
2008. Brian Wallace is the owner and curator of the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, the gallery currently representing Sheng
Qi’s work. The Red Gate Gallery was one of the first commercial galleries in China, and Brian Wallace has more than
twenty years experience working with Chinese contemporary art.
17 Jerome Silbergeld, Zhang Hongtu: An On-going Painting Project (New York: On-going Publications, 2000), 2.
42 Boucher • Beyond Pop
time in Normandy in the early 1890’s.18 Zhang not only imitates Claude Monet’s
(1840–1926) brushwork and use of color, but also uses the series as a reference to
Monet’s practice of depicting the same subject at different times of day under different lighting.
At first sight, these paintings are compelling in that their beauty makes one
almost forget the disconcerting, albeit harmonious, unity of two wildly different images. Zhang chooses two works from opposite sides of the globe and with 600 years’
distance between them that happen to have very similar compositions. The craggy
rocks surrounded by the sparse trees in Zhao Mengfu’s ink painting mirror the round
forms of Monet’s haystacks. Monet’s hazy backgrounds of field, grass, and sky coincide with Zhao’s spare, simple treatment of the space surrounding the cluster of rocks.
As Zhang Hongtu collides these two works, opportunities for comparisons abound:
the dry brushstrokes that outline the rocks in Zhao Mengfu’s work seem to evoke the
shaggy silhouettes of Monet’s haystacks, the rocks seem paired just as harmoniously
as Monet’s clusters of haystacks, and the atmospheric treatment of space in each
of the works comes into conversation. Of course, this dialogue between the formal
components of Zhao’s and Monet’s paintings is only one possible reading. There is
humor and parody in his juxtaposition of these unlikely counterparts. Zhang himself,
for example, sees these works as humorous, but observes that not all viewers react to
the humor.
Impressionism is one of the most popular movements in Western art, and Monet’s style is one of the most readily identifiable for the average viewer. Zhao Mengfu,
hailed as one of the great painters of the Yuan Dynasty, is also one of the most exalted in the Chinese canon of literati painters, one who was often visually quoted,
copied, and praised by connoisseurs. Zhang’s Zhao Mengfu–Monet series collides two
traditions, two icons of art history, and two canons. He cleverly imitates the collectors’ seals and connoisseurs’ commentaries on Elegant Rocks and Sparse Trees clustered
around the edge of Zhao’s paintings, referencing history’s own stamp of approval on
Zhao Mengfu’s work while tying that same stamp of approval to Monet and, humorously, to his own work. A pleasant surprise awaits the viewer who gets close enough,
and knows enough Chinese, to read the inscription that Zhang has placed in the
upper-left corner of Noon:
Thank you for coming close enough to read this calligraphy. You must
be able to understand Chinese, right? However, have you noticed something truly unfortunate has happened? When you come close enough
to read these words, which is to say right at this moment, you lose the
possibility of enjoying the painting as a whole. So, please step back five
or six steps (but be careful not to bump into anyone or anything behind
you!) Find what you feel to be an appropriate distance and angle, and
shift your attention from these words to the painting. Thank you for
18 Richard R. Brettell, “Monet’s Haystacks Reconsidered.” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 11.1 (1984): 4-21.
JSTOR. 12 November 2008 <http://www.jstor.org/search>.
Columbia East Asia Review 43
your attention.19
Without ignoring Zhang’s own advice to the viewer, namely, to “shift your attention
from these words,” we can gain a better understanding of Zhang’s parody from this
playful inscription. Zhang adds to the shock of finding a Chinese work painted in
Monet’s style with his pointed address to the viewer. He directly references the gallery
or museum context in which the viewer must be viewing the painting (“be careful
not to bump into anyone or anything behind you!”). In his address to the viewer, he
introduces a consciousness of the surroundings into the painting by referencing at
once the painting’s place in art history with the seals, and the specific moment in time
in which it is perceived by the viewer. In addressing the viewer, Zhang recognizes
the painting’s autonomy as an object, as a separate entity that communicates with
an individual viewer, and its dependence on the perceiver, who holds the power of
interpretation over the painting.
Zhang’s skillful imitation of Zhao Mengfu’s composition and Monet’s painting
style challenges the uniqueness of each of these artists’ work. As he skillfully imitates
Monet’s attention to light and color, as well as the impressionist’s signature non-linear
brushwork, Zhang plays with the concept of Impressionism itself. Monet aimed to
capture unique moments in time with his series paintings of the same subject in different seasons, while Zhang twists the supposedly irreproducible moment that Impressionism so highly values by simulating a scene and a moment that Monet himself
could never have encountered. Likewise, he effaces the expressive, descriptive quality
of Zhao Mengfu’s brushwork that Chinese painters prized with the impressionistic
style of Monet, while referencing the Chinese preoccupation with connoisseurship
and the elitist system of ownership with his humorous colophon and painted-on false
seals. Zhang’s conceptual basis straddles the two different visual cultures as well, playing with the referential quality of Pop art and its challenges to authorship alongside
the Chinese tradition of fang (仿).20
How can we define the vocabulary of pop? Though Zhang Hongtu’s series
bears little similarity, at least in appearance, to Andy Warhol’s screen prints or Roy
Lichtenstein’s hand-painted comic strips, Zhang also engages in a practice of appropriating and interpreting iconic imagery. The main difference in Zhang’s treatment of
the imagery is that he approaches Chinese images and Impressionist styles in Repainting Chinese Shanshui Landscapes both as icons and as aesthetic components, while
Pop artists Warhol and Lichtenstein chose to privilege iconography and subordinate aesthetics. Zhang’s approach to his two icons of art history requires meticulous,
manual translation of Zhao’s composition into Monet’s style while carefully choosing
formal elements to preserve the beauty of both sources—a far cry from Warhol’s
screen printing process. In creating this hybrid, Zhang both literally and figuratively
collapses the space of the picture plane. There is a flatness in his Zhao Mengfu–Monet
19 Ibid., 35.
20 In this series Zhang sees himself as a chameleon of styles, and delights in training his hand to recreate the work
of others (Personal interview). The Chinese tradition of copying, fang, is custom that prescribed that artists trained
their hands and eyes mainly by copying from past masters and referring to the canon of great paintings, and also set
conventions of subject matter and composition.
44 Boucher • Beyond Pop
series that arises from blending the line-based composition of Zhao Mengfu with the
light-and-color focus of Monet’s work as well as from indicating the flatness of the
surface by painting seals and inscriptions directly onto the painting. Zhang incorporates flatness conceptually both by removing the distance, both historical and artistic,
between Zhao Mengfu and Monet, and by appropriating their styles and compositions as icons in their own right.
Flatness yields a metaphorical reading as well as a space of exploded distinctions and undefined boundaries. There is a lack of distinction between high and low
art, art and object, signifying symbol and signified meaning in the flatness of Pop art.
However, Zhang’s project is unique in that he also explores the formal qualities of the
image—an aspect of imagery that Pop artists often hold at a distance—alongside the
conceptual significance of appropriation. Parody and critique operate both broadly
and specifically, and the vocabulary of Pop also opens up possibilities for targeted
critique. Zhang chooses his imagery deliberately in order to appropriate not only an
image, but also an entire range of signified meanings that correspond to that image.
Within a closed linguistic system—a specific cultural context where viewers and artists understand and communicate in the same visual “language”—these images have
a life of their own outside of the artwork and apart from the artist. When an image is
incorporated into a common visual language, it becomes not just a representation of
another object existing in reality, but also, in the words of Jean Baudrillard, a “[substitute] sign of the real for the real itself.” 21
Zhang plays with the concept of style and its role in indicating the authorship
of a work of art. Michel Foucault describes this phenomenon in his essay “What Is an
Author?” in reference to written works, but his analysis is equally relevant for visual
art: “The author is defined as a constant level of value … as a field of conceptual or
theoretical coherence … as a stylistic unity [and] as a historical figure at the crossroads of a certain number of events.” 22 He aptly notes that this “author function” is a
construction of coherence, which takes a material form in the single, coherent figure
creating works of art united by style and conceptual preoccupations existing, naturally, at a specific point in space and history. Foucault’s concern, and mine as well, is
not whether the “author” has died, or whether the author has ever really existed, but
rather the system of meanings and value surrounding the very idea of an author. This
is the same system of meaning that the vocabulary of Pop art excels at evoking and
subverting. Zhang takes advantage of the parallel between the apparent uniqueness
of a single work and the apparent uniqueness of the identity of an author, violating
both as he appropriates images from other works of art and other artists’ stylistic
identities. By uniting the components of coherent authorship derived from separate
artists, he draws attention to the author function in general and places his own authorial identity in opposition to these artistic conventions. This explosion of the author
function and the consequent dissolution of coherence lies at the root of parody and
21 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983),
4.
22 Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?”, The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, (New York: Pantheon Books,
1984), 111.
Columbia East Asia Review 45
socio-political critique in the vocabulary of Pop art, and also begs the following question: can the vocabulary of Pop art give us any insight into the identity of the artist
as an individual?
II. The Impersonal Image and Authorial Identity
Zhang Hongtu prefaces his online gallery of Mao images with the following declaration of purpose:
I believe in the power of the image, but I don’t believe in the authority of
the image … If you stare at a red shape for a long time, when you turn
away, your retina will hold the image but you will see a green version of
the same shape. In the same way, when I lived in China, I saw the positive image of Mao so many times that my mind now holds a negative
image of Mao. In my art I am transferring this psychological feeling to
a physical object.23
Zhang translates this “negative image of Mao” visually in his Material Mao series by
cutting the outline of Mao’s famous portrait—the same that hangs in Tiananmen
Square, the same that Andy Warhol replicated as a silkscreen series—into a range
of both organic and non-organic materials. The organic component of the series
includes Stone Mao (1992) and Grass Mao (1995) [7], [6]. These examples are just a
small cross-section of a larger project, which includes Mao cutouts of sizes ranging
from as small as a stone tile to a doorway large enough to walk through.
The Material Mao series questions the very nature of creating art because the
creation of these works involves an explicitly negative process of taking away material rather than building up an image. Cutting away might be seen as a sort of antidrawing or anti-painting. The shape, color, and texture of the object from which the
portrait is cut from are the only formal elements that remain. In Stone Mao, the rough
surface and the naturally broken edges of the stone slab communicate depth and
weight, straddling two-dimensional and sculptural boundaries. The cut-out of Mao’s
bust sinks into the surface of the stone, making the stone that remains more tangible
while the work’s namesake is literally missing.
Grass Mao engages in the same playful reversal of positive and negative space
and also functions as a sculpture or object as well as a two-dimensional work. Grass
Mao is planted into a thick wooden frame exhibited on the floor, further emphasizing its ambiguous status as an object as well as a work of art. The media used in
Grass Mao and Stone Mao also bring the binary of organic and inorganic into play.
While the stone in Stone Mao is durable, the grass in Grass Mao carries implications
of life, growth, change, and eventual decay. Mao’s silhouette, by contrast, is entirely
insubstantial; therefore, he will neither alter nor ever be “material.” The immateriality
of Mao in the Material Mao series calls for a more symbolic reading of the negative
image burned into Zhang Hongtu’s retina. This series is a material testament to the
23 Zhang Hongtu, MoMAO.com: Museum of My Art Only, http://www.momao.com.
46 Boucher • Beyond Pop
power of context and the power of icons as a commonly understood visual language.
The reference is purposely culturally specific, and the impact of the image depends
greatly on a common visual language with the audience.
Zhang’s series raises another issue, related to but separate from that of viewer
reception: how is the artist personally connected with his or her work? Zhang describes his motivation to begin working with the image of Mao in the 1980s after he
had moved to New York out of a need that was strong to the point of compulsion.
Though Mao portraits are now common or even clichéd in the contemporary art
market, Zhang Hongtu’s first work with Mao images predates this phenomenon in
mainland China by two or three years, and Wu Hung goes so far as to suggest that
Zhang inadvertently created the first works of Political Pop.24 Living in the United
States not only afforded him greater freedom of expression, but also distanced him
from the ideological constraints that had prevented him from portraying Mao as an
art student during the Cultural Revolution because of his class background.25 However, the distance that allowed him greater freedom may have also influenced the
feelings of lack and hollowness that he expresses conceptually.
The Material Mao series shapes the “negative image of Mao” held in Zhang’s
mind into a physical lack, perhaps in order to better understand the psychological
feeling. In one telling moment, he described in an interview his first experience of
cutting into an image of Mao in order to make a series of collages. He says, “the first
time I cut Mao’s portrait with a knife and put it back together to make a new Mao
image, I felt guilty, sinful. Can you imagine? Mao died fifteen years ago, but I still
felt guilty doing that artwork.”26 Zhang’s guilt underscores the personal significance
of Mao’s image to the artist. This personal significance cannot be understood through
an analysis of any concrete emotions towards Mao as an icon, but perhaps can best be
expressed using the artist’s own words, as a battle with the “authority of the image.”
Just as the mere outline of Mao in common objects, a Mao-shaped hole, is affecting
enough to evoke the image of Mao and all connotations of Mao, slicing into the paper portrait stirred up a visceral reaction for Zhang. This reaction is shocking because
of the unsettling nature of the reduction itself. The realization of how the simplest
image can evoke a complex and abstract signified concept sheds light on an unconscious and unsettling connection between the image and the viewer and exposes the
mind’s vulnerability to images. This unsettling power also has very material ramifications, if one considers that the real political power of Mao’s image, which symbolized
his tyranny over daily life and also enabled this tyranny. While Wang Guangyi and
Sheng Qi subvert and reverse political agendas in images, Zhang Hongtu explodes
the ideological power of the image of Mao by showing that the meaning of the image
is psychological, and like the Material Mao, physically insubstantial.
Sheng Qi produced a series of paintings and prints in 2006, all of which focus
on his four-fingered left hand. The series, entitled My Left Hand, encompasses some
24 Chiu, Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China, 67, and Wu, Hung, Transience, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999), 45.
25 Wu, Transience, 49.
26 Chiu, Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China, 68.
Columbia East Asia Review 47
of Sheng Qi’s most fascinating and subtle works, as it juxtaposes the artist directly
with tiny images cradled in the palm of his hand [8]. Sheng Qi cut off his left pinky,
a declaration of outrage and protest after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The portrayal of the hand could be read without political connotations simply through the
series title that declares the hand to be Sheng’s own, as a symbol of the artist’s personal
connection to the images in his palm. However, if one is familiar with the context
surrounding his missing finger, the hand may also be read as an icon—a symbol for
a range of sociopolitical implications, from Sheng’s outrage with the Chinese government to the wounds of history, and from the unacknowledged atrocities of the CCP
to the suppression of dissent. In two of paintings of the My Left Hand series, My
Left Hand–Mao (2006) and My Left Hand–Old Mao (2006), the hand occupies the
majority of two large, square canvasses, erect but silent in a mimic salute. Sheng also
seems to hold his hand up in front of the viewer as proof, an indexical of an event
that has been purposely obscured and obliterated from China’s collective memory to
be replaced by government narratives of history.
In My Left Hand–Mao Sheng paints his hand in the same rough style of his Tiananmen painting, allowing the paint to run down the canvas in both the foreground
and the background. Planted in the center of his palm, in the center of the canvas, is
a small copy of the official portrait of Mao Zedong that hangs in Tiananmen Square.
The portrait contrasts sharply with the vibrant yellows and reds of the painting, sitting very still and isolated by its frame, its photographic realism and its monochrome
coloring. We can read the portrait as a signifier for its larger counterpart hanging on
Tiananmen, in keeping with the reference to the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and
as suggestive of Mao’s part in the chain of events that led to the disaster. The portrait
is also a mark of Mao’s omnipresence, a symbolically floating image superimposed
on even the most personal of individual conflicts. Or, taking the portrait’s centered
position into account, we can also read it as a signifier for the centering of Mao in
Chinese ideology, for his symbolic position in the Chinese cultural consciousness.
The hand’s detachment in the painting from Sheng’s body is coupled with
the physical violence against his own body that the painting depicts. The shock of
viewing a disfigured hand implies violence. Moreover, Mao’s image at the center of
the painting seems incongruous and provokes a similar visceral reaction—it too is
discontinous like a disfigurement. In this manner, Sheng Qi fractures his body to
make a political critique. The process of mobilizing his work against the meanings
of the icons of Tiananmen, of Mao Zedong, and has necessarily resulted in harm to
his body, with consequences for the identity of the artist. Sheng describes his work as
politically motivated and thinks of himself as a “warrior,” using his brush to fight.27
Though Sheng believes in his personal agency to interpret these images, envisioning
himself as a soldier with a brush as his weapon, the process of rewriting history with
a paintbrush both alters him as an author and subsumes his identity within political
discourse.
27 “I myself, as an individual, use my brush to be a warrior, to battle and prevail.” (�Wo ziji yigeren yong huabi zuo zhanshi,
zhansheng 我自己一个人用画笔做战士，战胜) Sheng Qi. Personal interview. 26 June 2008. (English translation my own)
48 Boucher • Beyond Pop
III. The Politics of Appropriation
How does the vocabulary of Pop art facilitate political and social critique? This vocabulary excels at creating ambiguity and flatness while negating any definitive meanings
that a work of art can convey, such as anti-capitalist sentiment, critique of the cult of
Mao and of the canon of art history, etc. The process of appropriation removes the
image from its original context, and makes it possible to re-evaluate its significance.
In a similar vein, Andy Warhol’s 1972 silkscreen painting series, Mao, can be read in
many ways by different viewers; however, the image does definitively appropriate the
portrait of Mao and unhinge the commonly understood meaning of the Chairman’s
image [3]. The large silk-screen image on canvas dates back to 1973 and was also
part of a series of Mao portraits, part of the series of celebrities and political figures
that Warhol created throughout his career. The work consists of a five-color silkscreen
image with additional painting directly on the surface of the canvas. The black print
that outlines Mao’s face is full of holes and cracks, and the registration on the print
is shifted from color to color so that the image does not line up correctly. Mao’s pink
lips, flat blue eyes and sickly, jaundiced skin give him a clown-like and lifeless appearance, and the wide white space at his collar makes his head seem eerily disembodied.
The linear and tonal simplicity of the print and the deliberate carelessness with which
it was printed, provide a sharp contrast to the original portrait, which depicts a larger
than life and all too real Mao. Warhol makes no attempt to hide the origin of the image, and even directly indicates the concept of copying in his rendition of Mao’s portrait. By allowing gaps between the layers of colors and pockmarks to appear in the
silkscreen, he allows the viewer to see the process clearly, from the photo transfer to
the layers of screen-printed colors, to draw attention to flatness and the surface. Like
Lichtenstein’s anti-gesture brushstrokes, Warhol’s scribbles at the bottom-right of the
canvas and at Mao’s eyes, cheek and mouth seem random and purposeless, as their
placement and shape do not accent the portrait image. The brushstrokes float on top
of the image, giving the impression that Warhol’s own hand is equally mechanical as
his work with the silkscreen.
Warhol’s Mao emphasizes rather than conceals the mechanical process of creating an icon. By emphasizing the low quality of the image and the flat lifelessness of
Mao, Warhol undermines the purpose of Mao’s portrait for the original audience of
viewers in Communist China. Mao Zedong’s portrait becomes an icon because the
image ceases to be a mimetic depiction of an object existing outside itself—it takes on
a life of its own. Jean Baudrillard calls this effacement of the distinction between copy
and original, cause and effect, “simulation.” Icons are simulacra in Baudrillard’s sense
because they have significance without having a specific original, they are perpetuated in their “purged form”—part of a commonly understood language rather than
descriptive representations of real objects.28
It is also necessary to point out Warhol’s personal and cultural distance from
the figure of Mao since the artist’s place outside of Chinese society inevitably affects
28 Baudrillard, Simulations, 37.
Columbia East Asia Review 49
his interpretation of the icon. Though Warhol’s treatment of the portrait is more
complex than might be apparent, his apathetic approach to Mao’s image contrasts
sharply with Chinese artist Sheng Qi’s approach, which utilizes political imagery
with far more personal and emotional motivations. His painting Tiananmen, one of
a series of paintings of an annual military parade on Chang’an Avenue, consists of
acrylic hand-painting over a photo transfer silkscreen print. The silk-screened photo
in Tiananmen shows tanks parading in front of the gate to the Forbidden City [4].
He retains enough transparency that the silkscreened image remains visible but obscured beneath his own predominantly red brushwork. Spatters of paint, drips, and
large vigorous strokes give the image a sense of motion. In the last part of his process,
he writes “graffiti” across the canvas, which bears more of a similarity to handwriting
than calligraphy, since it seems scribbled rather than painted with precision.
Sheng Qi utilizes writing as a formal element as well as a conceptual one. The
writing is layered in such a way that characters blend together, as at the horizon line
and at the edges of the tanks, to create planes of hazy tone. The characters become
larger and more pronounced as they approach the foreground, mimicking the effects
of linear perspective. In this sense, writing behaves as line and tone rather than strictly
as language. This interpretation suggests a link between images and linguistic signs,
as if a component of language such as a character can be equated with a collection of
brushstrokes, which comprise any other kind of image. Hence, Sheng’s use of written
language illustrates the arbitrariness as well as the signifying potential of images. The
tanks and the famous Tiananmen gate silhouette are signifiers in their own right, as
Sheng chooses the parade image for its symbolic potential. To a certain set of viewers, and to Sheng Qi himself, the image of the tanks against the Tiananmen Square
backdrop immediately recalls the June Fourth Incident (the Chinese appellation)
or the Tiananmen Square Massacre (one European and American appellation) of
1989.29 In some of the paintings in his Tiananmen Parade series, Sheng reverses the
direction of the tanks from west to east instead of the usual direction of the parade,
east to west, to reference the direction in which the tanks moved on June 4, 1989.
Though the reference is lost on any viewers unacquainted with the event, Sheng’s
formal treatment of the image alone effectively conveys force and brutality. In many
ways he engages personally and emotionally with his canvasses. At the same time he
appropriates propaganda imagery and his conceptual concerns are social and political. Compared to Andy Warhol’s sparse scribbles on the surface of the Mao silkscreen,
Sheng Qi’s brushwork seems earnest and direct.
Sheng proceeds to subvert the official image of the military parade and to do
violence, conceptually, to the image. He uses writing on the surface of the painting to
deface the official image. He embraces the ability of painting to record a long period
of time, or to record “history.”30 He says he has stopped working with photography
because the frozen moment in photography preserves what should rightfully be fleeting.31 His feelings on photography translate into the contrast between the animated
29 Personal interview with Sheng Qi.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
50 Boucher • Beyond Pop
movement of his own brushstrokes and the static photo silkscreen beneath. His drips
on the surface of the canvas can point to multiple meanings. They can indicate the
passage of time as indexes of the movement of the paint and the paint’s metamorphosis from wet to dry, or they can symbolize running, dripping blood. Also, the drips
and the graffiti alike draw attention to the flatness of the canvas by acting as markers
of the physical interaction of paint with a flat surface. The push and pull between
the static flatness of the photographic image, graffiti and drips, and the feeling of
motion in Sheng’s brushwork makes it appear that Sheng is fighting to animate the
propaganda image and arrives at a standstill. With his brushwork, the painter strives
to inject life into an image that holds only symbolic, rather than personal or emotional, meaning.
Tiananmen appropriates, modifies, and defaces the image of the military parade to perform political critique. Sheng approaches a subject that has been forcefully
silenced and eliminated from the language of the Chinese populace today. His inability to engage the subject of Tiananmen becomes a marker of the government’s control
over dialogue. In the painting, Sheng’s frustration with the failures of photography
translates into an attack on the principle of the image. In Tiananmen, he critiques
the official narrative of the parade and the narrative of the stability and grandeur of
the Chinese Communist Regime by removing it from the official context to focus on
what he views as the hollowness of the symbol. In his hands, the official propaganda
image becomes a signifier for the taboo subject of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
This attack on a photograph that stands for the Chinese government’s propaganda
and meant to convey the power and glory of the CCP, exposes the image as fundamentally superficial. Just as Warhol’s Mao strips the leader of his grandeur, Sheng Qi
reverses the official meanings of the image with ruthless subversion.
Wang Guangyi was the most important founder of the art movement in the
early 1990s, which critic Li Xianting (栗宪庭)������������������������������������
later dubbed Political Pop, characterized by works that adopted a bold, Pop art-inspired style and dealt mainly with
political imagery.32 Wang Guangyi began painting his Great Criticisms (大批判, da
pipan)33 series in 1991 and continued to produce work from the same series until
2003. Random letters and numbers are scattered around the canvasses, a precursor
to his use of numbers and words in the “Great Criticisms.”34 For Wang, who suffered
profoundly due to his family’s persecution during the Cultural Revolution, criticism
connotes Communist orthodoxy, indoctrination, and the blind acceptance of ideology. Consequently, the phrase “Great Criticisms” becomes ironic in light of all the
negative connotations that the title, let alone the imagery, seems to exalt. However,
Wang Guangyi’s own work is criticism of a very different sort. Wang’s work undermines these value systems in order to question, but also to purposely avoid any
32 Köppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare: The Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979-1989. A Semiotic Analysis, 160-1.
33 The Asia Society exhibition “Inside/Out: New Chinese Art”, which exhibited the painting Coca-Cola abroad in
1998, translates da pipan (大批判) as “Great Castigations”, perhaps to make a more explicitly negative reference to CCP
rhetoric. I use the translation “Great Criticisms” which, in my experience, is more commonly used in English texts on
Wang Guangyi’s work. (http://www.asiasociety.org/arts/insideout/work_22.html)
34 Köppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare: The Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979-1989. A Semiotic Analysis, 152.
Columbia East Asia Review 51
answers or solutions.
I will confine my analysis to the well-known painting Coca-Cola (1993) from
Great Criticisms, although it is important to note that the same observations could
apply to almost any of the paintings from the series [5]. The paintings of the Great
Criticisms vary in precise imagery, composition, palette and other particulars, but
they have in common the same group of subjects and stylistic elements. The paintings
are large-scale (Coca-Cola is over six feet square) and are executed in a commercialpainter style employed by Pop artists Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol earlier in his career, James Rosenquist, and others. These Pop artists were trained commercially and
favored the style characterized by invisible brushstrokes, impeccably smooth surfaces,
crisp, clean lines and bright colors. The style is detached and mechanical, effacing all
the distinguishing traces of an “artistic” execution (such as brushstrokes and abstraction), and allows the artist to play with commercial implications. After all, the style
is intended to create an image of an attractive product, or in this case, an attractive
product that also happens to be an image. The concept of a commodity is already
intrinsic in the style in which the image is painted. Ironically, Wang appropriates propaganda poster images from the Cultural Revolution for the Great Criticisms series
by preserving the woodblock-cut line work to outline androgynous male and female
figures in Mao suits. These figures wield pens, books, and paintbrushes, the weapons
of Communism, in their disproportionately large hands, meant in the propaganda
images to symbolize the power of the working classes.
Wang confronts an issue in his Great Criticisms series that is a fundamental
component of Pop art’s project: how does one depict hollowness, a lack of substance?
The solution is the flatness of the imagery and lack of pictorial depth, which isolate
the image as a literally and conceptually flat icon, and ambiguity, which alters the
context and consequently, the meaning of the appropriated image. Coca-Cola does
not make a direct critique of capitalism or communism. The juxtaposition of the two
symbols of communism and capitalism, the workers holding the pen and the CocaCola logo, respectively, does not favor one over the other. They are simply set sideby-side, painted in a very similar manner, with the same crisp edges and flat, blocky
shapes. There is no set focal point on which the viewer’s eye might rest, because the
whole painting contains the same sharp lines, bold colors and depthless space. The
uniformly printed numbers also coat each logo equally, flattening them both equally
and imbibing both the figures and the Coca-Cola logo with apparent arbitrariness.
The workers grasp a pen or pole that jabs into the Coca-Cola logo, but Wang renders
their symbolic gesture static and, therefore, impotent. Wang does not allow for an
easy reading, or easy conclusions. He portrays the symbols of communism and capitalism as equally depthless and equally ambiguous in their new context. These Great
Criticisms undermine the very principle of critique by refusing to focus the viewer’s
attention on any root problem or condemnation. In Coca-Cola there is no solution
to be found. Wang rebels against criticism that hinges on ideological absolutes to
identify problems, and through his refusal to participate in this brand of critique he
constructs a critique of “criticism” itself.
52 Boucher • Beyond Pop
Wang Guangyi is one of the most commercially successful Chinese artists alive
today, and his Great Criticisms have become icons in their own right. Wang’s decision
to continue the series is not without commercial considerations. One phenomenon
of the exploding art market in China today is the pressure on artists to “brand”
themselves, and the expectation pressuring them to produce the same kind of works
that are most popular and commercially successful for the length of their careers – in
Wang Guangyi’s case, for twelve years until 2003.35 Critics, curators and artists whom
I interviewed, attributed this to a range of possible causes, ranging from the reluctance of collectors to take a chance on unknown works, to the Chinese propensity
for copying. While the former can be considered less likely, considering the newness
of the market in general and the tendency towards short fads encouraged by international collectors, the latter can be traced back to the old tradition of fang in Chinese
painting. I believe that this trend marks just how strong market forces are and just
how much they influence what artists choose to produce. By contrast, Zhang Hongtu’s body of work is the most diverse, stylistically and conceptually, of these three
artists, and more diverse than most Chinese artists in general. The fact that Zhang
Hongtu lives and works in New York City is significant because expectations in art
markets outside of China are vastly different; generally, art markets demand diversity
(from a more cynical perspective, novelty) and are inhospitable to artists who fail to
show growth or willingness to explore.36 Pop artists also embraced “branding” as yet
another manifestation of the commercial component of their work, and as a method
of collapsing the distinction between commercial image culture and art. Great Criticisms, and Political Pop works in general, have become often-replicated icons of Contemporary Chinese Art only in part because of their commercial success. Their subject matter and style have become emblematic of the overall project of contemporary
art in China, if such a project can be said to exist. Great Criticisms combine symbols
of China with symbols of China’s change, wrapped up in the packaging of stereotype
and propaganda and sold for previously unimaginable prices.
Sheng Qi and Wang Guangyi both communicate within a currency of images
that are distinct from the works of art appropriated in the work of Zhang Hongtu.
These images carry explicit sociopolitical connotations within a certain language of
images: they are iconic because of their evocative power, and they are also stereotypes
because they are overused symbols of Chinese Communism and Western capitalism.
By appropriating these particular iconic images, the artists are able to make their
critique political in a manner impossible for Zhang Hongtu in Repainting Chinese
Shanshui Paintings. Wang’s critical attack is not aggressive, yet it is subversive – he
undermines the fundamental purpose of the images (that is, to convey a single ideology, by aligning every formal quality with that single end) as he changes their context
and transposes them into a space of flatness and ambiguity. The process of simulation
“starts… from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and
35 Personal interview with Christian and Alfreda Murck. Personal Interview with Brian Wallace. Personal interview with
Zhang Hongtu. Interview with Wang Guangyi, www.sina.com.cn
36 Personal interview with Christian and Alfreda Murck. Personal interview with Zhang Hongtu.
Columbia East Asia Review 53
death sentence of every reference.”37 In this way, Sheng and Wang both do violence
to the sign, flattening it and changing its significance to lay a “death sentence” on
the reference.
This blurring of boundaries illustrates the artist’s inability to maintain a “critical distance,” as Jameson puts it, from one’s own culture.38 He introduces Postmodernism as “an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten
how to think historically in the first place.”39 The works of Sheng Qi and Wang
Guangyi blur the distinctions between ideology, politics and culture. However, a
purely political reading of these works would neglect the spectrum of concepts that
the images evoke. They critique cultural institutions, such as taboo in Sheng Qi’s Tiananmen or the underlying political ambivalence in Wang Guangyi’s Coca-Cola, and
also explore the impact of appropriation on the voice of the artist and the autonomy
of the author. There exists a conceptual flatness that is symptomatic of the individual’s
disorientation, because flatness does not allow space in which to orient oneself.
Conclusion
For these artists, the manner in which these artworks alter the authorial position of the
artist, engage in appropriation and political critique, profoundly affects the painter’s
relationship to his own art. On one hand, using pre-existing imagery and replicating
that imagery either through mechanical processes or through mechanizing the hand
of the artist (in the cases of Zhang Hongtu and Roy Lichtenstein especially) complicates the concept of self-expression. Alternately, the process of reproduction is far
from entirely mechanized, and the resulting works of art are far from exact replicas.
Most importantly, the artists intervene conceptually and stylistically through their
choice of images and depiction: choice and personal intervention indicate an element
of individuality. The images engage with signified meanings that extend beyond the
borders of the canvas, and consequently it would be impossible to call the works of
these artists self-contained, autonomous means of self-expression. Their reference to
and concern with issues outside of the relationship of the work of art to the artist necessarily designates these works as part of a dialogue between context and the viewer.
The discourse surrounding these icons cannot belong to a single individual,
but the ability of Zhang Hongtu, Sheng Qi and Wang Guangyi to alter and appropriate such powerful icons speaks to how crucial their individual input is. Jameson’s
definition of Postmodern thought as self-analysis may prove useful in describing the
relationship of the artist with works in the vocabulary of Pop art. We understand ourselves as an age, meaning contextually, in relation to society and to history. Similarly,
an analysis of these artists’ work, an attempt to situate it or discover its meaning, can
continue to frustrate the viewer at every turn and to shift rapidly with every change
in context. In this way, their work is indicative of individual experience. For an artist
37 Baudrillard, Simulations, 11.
38 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005),
49.
39 Ibid., ix.
54 Boucher • Beyond Pop
working within these modes, the expression of a Truth about the self may not be possible. Nevertheless, instead of despairing in what one might see as the “meaninglessness” of coherent personal expression, we need to redefine self-expression. The very
process of appropriation becomes a mode of understanding, and the appropriated
icon opens up the creator and the viewer alike to introspection.
The replication of imagery undermines the truth of the author function by
creating a source-less image. Walter Benjamin theorized in his famous essay The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that the advent of technological reproduction stripped certain works of art of their “aura.” Aura is an elusive quality that
surrounds a work of art that is original (as opposed to a technologically produced,
and reproducible, work of art such as a photograph or a film which cannot be said
to have an original in the same sense as an oil painting) and connects the viewer
to a work of art at a “distance” that has to do with the art’s “original use value,” a
“ritualistic” quality.40 Though I do not wish to attribute this shift in the conception
of the author solely to technological reproduction, as Benjamin does, the concept
that certain works lack aura remains valid. Zhang Hongtu, Sheng Qi and Wang
Guangyi all work in media and modes of representation that according to Benjamin,
depart from the aura. However, aura plays an important part in their work and in
their approach to imagery, though it is of a different sort. The authority of the image that Zhang Hongtu speaks of can be understood as an aura that possesses many
of the same qualities of Benjamin’s, but is derived from a very different approach to
image making—from the reproduction, cultural significance and mass consumption
that Benjamin believes negates the aura.41 David Freedberg calls it the “aura of verisimilitude,” tracing it to a moment in which “the image is artificial, yet there is an
acknowledgement of significance, realism, the represented, that creates a tension.”42
If this concept is expanded further, it can explain the aura of authority that a familiar
and symbolic image with ideological value takes on. This sort of aura seems to fascinate all three artists, and as they replicate images with an aura of authority, they
find an ambiguous middle ground in which they inevitably reproduce the aura along
with the icon, but also succeed in subverting that same. For these artists, the process
of colliding individual artistry with the appropriation of images becomes a method
of understanding the relationship between these discrete pursuits, and an attempt to
close the gap between the two. Why do these three artists choose to paint the subjects
that they do? Simply put, to each the creation of his work seemed to be a process of
externalizing what these images meant to him.
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