CategoriesStyles and Movements
Political Pop
Chinese painting of the early 1990s that set Cultural Revolution imagery against the logos and advertising of the new market economy.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
In the early 1990s, as China turned from Maoist austerity to a consumer boom, painters set the visual language of the Cultural Revolution against the brands flooding into the country. The critic Li Xianting called the tendency Political Pop, alongside the Cynical Realism of Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun. Both grew from the chastened mood after 1989 and met official imagery with irony rather than protest.
Look for flat, poster-bright colour, heroic propaganda figures and the face of Mao Zedong recast in commercial styles. Wang Guangyi's Great Criticism series, begun in 1990, shows muscular workers, peasants and soldiers from propaganda posters beside logos such as Coca-Cola and Marlboro. Yu Youhan set Mao among decorative flowers and folk patterns, and Li Shan's Rouge series recast him in cosmetic pinks. The style owed a debt to Andy Warhol's Mao prints and brought Chinese contemporary painting wide international attention in 1993.
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