This text is an attempt to reflect on the image of Mao Zedong in People’s Republic of China and the politics of shaping his image. Mao Zedong, his politics, literary work, life, and other aspects of his long biography have been fairly well described by numerous researchers over the past few decades. However, far too little space has been devoted to the image of Mao Zedong in the consciousness of the Chinese.
Considering that Mao has been included into the set of deities and surrounded by a halo of divinity, the critical attitude to his figure verges on sacrilege. It is a surprising encounter of politics and religion, which Mao Zedong would not expect in his lifetime. In fact, only popular and avant-garde art, as well as individual oppositionists have made iconoclastic attempts to deconstruct the figure of Mao.

Transformation of the Chinese Art Market (1949-2019)

Over the past 70 years, the art market in China has achieved remarkable growth. This rapid development has brought China to the spotlight of the international art world. Initially, state-owned antique stores played a key role in acquiring works of art. It wasn’t until the 1980s that professional art galleries began to be opened, and the first auction houses did not appear until the early 1990s. The two largest auction houses: China Guardian (founded in 1993) and Poly Auctions (founded in 2005) occupy the third and fourth place in size of auction houses after Christie and Sotheby’s. Currently, Chinese art market has become the second largest in the world. Chinese paintings and works of art are the dominant selling category, and the largest group of buyers are Chinese collectors who perceive art as a way to locate their capital in the country. Due to the active acquisitions of artworks in both domestic and international art markets, Chinese art collectors have gained worldwide attention.

Wang Guangyi’s work and its influence on the development of pop art in China

Since the late 1970s, profound changes have been underway across all spheres of Chinese society, encompassing the arts, thereby giving rise to new artistic trends and transformative shifts within the entire artistic tradition. Chinese artists have increasingly asserted themselves on the international stage. Concurrently, as the West became intrigued by Chinese art, two prominent trends – political pop art and cynical realism – were notably burgeoning. Notably, political pop art emerged as a foremost artistic movement in China during the early 1990s. Central to this trend is a predilection for symbolism, serving as a conduit for artists to articulate their sentiments and societal perspectives. Wang Guangyi is widely acknowledged as the seminal figure behind this movement in China. This article delves into Wang Guangyi’s creative evolution and the genesis of political pop art, exploring the antecedents of this novel artistic trajectory, its conceptual underpinnings, and stylistic hallmarks.