DSL Magazine: Issue 6

Wang Guangyi’s own interpretation of the Death of Marat dates from before his well-known series Great criticism Series: Coca- cola (1993) which became iconic as to the relationship between China and the new Western influence: an heroic worker, peasant and soldier from revolutionary China are shown gripping Mao’s Little Red Book and the red Communist Party flag against a Coca- Cola advertising background. Wang (b.1957) is the spearhead of the so-called Political Pop Art movement, which developed during the 1990s. By merging the style of socialist realism with the emblems of capitalism like Coca- cola, the artist criticizes the new symbols of consumption, which were then submerging China as it opened to the West following the adoption of Deng Xiao Ping’s policy. Wang painted his Death of Marat two years after he graduated from the oil painting department of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts while he was confronting himself with Western philosophy. The work belongs to his Post Classical series (1986-1988), a systematic attempt to appropriate and revise the great works of Western art to deconstruct them in a provocative way. In his own version, the human figure -supposedly Marat - is not recognizable, seized in an almost abstract style, drained of colour. The scene depicted by Wang loses its entire heroic dimension and does not trigger any emotion. The duplication of the figure, as if a mirror was standing in the middle of the work, has been read as a pop motif. It could also be seen as a metaphor for the artist’s quest for references at a time when he was searching for his own style. Wang did actually two artworks untitled the Death of Marat , both in the same style and following his reading of EH Gombrich’s Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960). He then considered western paintings as starting points from where to begin his own career and from which he could develop his personal visual language. The Death of Marat Wang Guangyi , The Death of Marat, 1986, oil on canvas, 150 x 200 cm Courtesy of the artist and M+ Sigg Collection