Wang Guangyi: Wang Guangyi is the leading protagonist of the post-1989 Political Pop movement - one of the major artistic movements to have developed in the aftermath of the events of 1989 - Tiananmen Square and the closure of the China/Avant Garde exhibition at the China National Gallery.
Wang Guangyi's aesthetics entails sampling of various imagery (such as well-known propaganda-images and photographs), and fusing them with corporate brand-names in order to undermine their original purpose. In combining ideology and advertisement, he criticizes the apparent 'truths' of both. In short, he marks the Socialist Realist iconography and symbols with another contradictory discursive system.
In the mid-1980s, Wang Guangyi espoused a humanist vision of art for post-Mao China. His series of paintings entitled "Frozen North Pole" sought to evoke, in the artist's words, "a kind of beauty of sublime reason which contains constant, harmonious feelings of humanity."
