Wang Guangyi (b. 1956)

Wang Guangyi's immediately recognizable Great Criticism paintings have become iconic of the transformation shaping China's social, cultural, and political life in the last several decades. The circumstances of Wang's art are contemporary China - a landscape where two ideologically antithetical systems have collided head-on: consumer capitalism and Chinese communism. But the short-hand focus on political themes under the heading of "Political Pop" obscures the ways in which Wang's deconstructive concerns are also, and have always been, fundamentally aesthetic.