The Philosophy and Art of Wang Guangyi

Wang Guangyi is the most significant painter to have emerged out of the 1980s encounter between Western and Chinese postmodernisms. This volume’s essays and interviews --adeptly traversing conventional boundaries of art criticism, philosophy, history, and political theory—comprise the most significant treatment in English of Guangyi’s ironic, intellectual, cool, subversive, and yet wildly popular art. And more generally, the book makes vivid how Chinese contemporary art, despite deploying seemingly similar aesthetic strategies to those found in the West, developed out of substantially sui generis concerns. -- Jonathan Gilmore, Associate Professor of Philosophy, City University of New York, USA
By focusing on Wang Guangyi, a trendsetter in contemporary Chinese art since the mid-1980s, this original volume presents a variety of angles to rethink many key concepts and visual strategies in contemporary art across the East-West divide. In so doing it provides an unusually detailed and sensitive analysis of an important artist as well as a possible model for transregional and interdisciplinary studies on global contemporary art. -- Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor, The University of Chicago, USA