Yang Guoxin B. 1951

While many of the artists who make up the Political Pop movement that drove contemporary art in China through the early 1990s have been compared to Andy Warhol, only Yang Guoxin has truly brought silkscreening-that staple of the Warholian vocabulary-into the Chinese context. His compositions in the early 1990s drew on the political iconography of the moment, incorporating current newspapers and news photographs along with more iconic images such as the face of Chairman Mao. The present work, entitled "Twelve Faces of a Woman," frames two images taken from news photographs of Mao's last wife Jiang Qing, each repeated six times. In the first image, depicting Jiang speaking into broadcasting microphones, Yang has in places darkened her face and clothing with red paint. In the lower image, which shows Jiang clapping (presumably at some political declaration), he has positioned the repetitions such that her hands touching hands face alternately left and right-a less-than-subtle riff on the political vicissitudes which labeled artists and intellectuals as leftists or rightists during the Maoist era. 
Yang's work takes an interest in the formal and conceptual properties of socialist visual language, and in the artistic level at which the Warholian critique of mass culture becomes possible in a society where the masses were once predominant. He is, at heart, a sophisticate and an aesthete his compositions knowing winks at the Pop legacy rather than unthinking imitations of foreign forms. His playful and experimental tone distinguishes himself from better-known contemporaries, who seem to revel more in the political gesture of subverting established icons. Yang Guoxin thus brings us even closer to the literal meaning of "political pop," truly fusing the inherited pictorial traditions of the People's Republic with an international visual language that foreshadows the contemporary Chinese style then in the making.