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WANG Ziwei, <Poker>, Acrylic on canvas, 90.5x150cm, 1988
[China] WANG Ziwei Poker
Wang Ziwei is one of the artists emerged from the wave of “Political Pop” at the beginning of the 1990s. A student of Yu Youhan, Wang has demonstrated exceptional and sophisticated painting skills since the early 1980s. From 1987, he began to adopt flat painting method as he adopted the image of Mao into his paintings, then adding various popular components of the west, by which to gesture towards the social contexts in contemporary China. The King and Queen in Poker are popular visual icons from the west, serving as an analogy of social conditions in contemporary China, such that, the protagonists’ attires, colors and facial expressions convey a strange atmosphere; the facial expressions of the King and Queen symbolize supreme power, while the same image shares a double face, underscores the disparity between media information on social issues and the unveiled truth. The image of the “King” and “Queen” each has an ambiguous aspect, and each represents the characteristics and relationships of those figures in the political ecology at the time. In the post “Political Pop” period, Wang developed a series of paintings inclined for conceptual “text”, from the semantics of the language to the attributes of the objects, and to the psychology of the viewer, building a knowledge structure that reconsiders art from form to meaning. |
