The Political Pop Art of Wang Guangyi: Metonymic for an Alternative Modernity

• Main Author: Poborsa, James D.
• Other Authors: Purtle, Jennifer
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: Chinese art; Wang Guangyi; art history; cultural studies; contemporary chinese art; political pop art; China; Modern China; cultural history; china neoliberalism; postsocialist; postmodern art; 0377
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/18979

This thesis examines the political pop art of contemporary Chinese artist Wang Guangyi in light contemporaneous shifts within the political, economic, and artistic space of China from 1978 until the present. Through an analysis of the work of art as an historically determined antagonistic aesthetic praxis, this thesis attempts to reveal the sedimented traces of the alternative modernity which the Chinese government is actively attempting to construct. With its evocative juxtaposition of contrasting ideological forms, the artwork of Wang Guangyi seeks to deconstruct the normative and teleological narratives encountered within the dialectic interplay between state sponsored transnational capitalism and Marxist-Leninist communism. An understanding of the discursive structure upon which these dual modernising narratives has been based, and of the fragmented artistic space they have engendered, should serve to enliven the debate concerning the role of cultural production in questioning and revealing narratives of the nation, of the Self, and of modernity.