Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, February 14, 2026 : Wang Guangyi. A Chinese painter (#2480)

Saturday, February 14, 2026

Artist of the Day, February 14, 2026 : Wang Guangyi. A Chinese painter (#2480)

The son of a railroad in Northeast China, Wang Guangyi has lived through the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). He worked three years in a rural town. After the father’s retirement, he became a railroad, never stopping abandoning the dream of frequenting the college. After several failed attempts, he was admitted to the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, where he graduated in 1984 in oil painting. He currently lives and works in Beijing, China. Despite the harsh poverty conditions of his childhood, Guangyi avoids discussing any issue related to money and wealth. He has attracted the attention of critics and the international market with his Great Criticism work cycle, which has made him an icon of Chinese contemporary art.

The rapid critical and market success of the Great Criticism cycle has led some critics to argue that, “as previously Dalí and Warhol, Wang Guangyi has exceeded the serial production of his most successful works.” In reality, the artist has always worked in other cycles, in a contemporary way, and in 2007 he ceased to definitively make paintings of the Great Criticism cycle.

The work of the Frozen North Pole cycle mainly uses signs of cold and desolation. They are characterized by the use of simple and morbid brushstrokes to represent a winter atmosphere, in principle familiar to the artist, while as a young man he had lived in North China. The North Pole is seen in these paintings not in relation to their geographical characteristics, but as a symbolic place where a new faith is born and the singular are mainly related to themselves, without dissociating themselves from the social. In the years in which these paintings have been made, faith and future were represented in China by communism, but before making their own the theses of dialectical materialism, the group of young artists of the North, of which Wang Guangyi was part, chooses to confront texts of Western philosophy.

The concept of faith crafted by Wang Guangyi and other artists close to him finds a certain affinity with Western classical art. The Post Classical series was born from the synthetic review of Western art masterpieces linked to the themes of religion, morals, faith and ideology. These paintings use various shades of gray and synthesize the human figure and the environment in which it is inserted, eliminating many details. His goal was to craft a language that differed from classical art, a strategy used to express personal concepts and viewpoints elaborated after Gombrich’s reading.

Great Criticism, 1990–2007
These works use propaganda images of the Cultural Revolution and logos of contemporary brands from Western advertising. Wang Guangyi has performed this cycle since 1990 and has put an end to it in 2007, convinced that his international market success made him run the risk of compromising the original meaning, which was to consider political and commercial propaganda as two different ways of brainwashing.

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