circumscribed by this reading. In 1992, the authoritative Western art magazines Flash Art and Art News gave ample coverage of Great Criticism, which allowed Guangyi to participate in the Cocart International Art Invitational held in Italy and the 45th Venice Biennale. Ever since, Great Criticism’s Political Pop not only became the main route through which Westerners came to know contemporary Chinese art, it also became, for critics, the main reference through which to judge the success or failure of Wang Guangyi’s later projects. Critics felt that “this artwork, in terms of art, is just a copy of little value”, which affirms that “as China passes its political peak and moves towards its economic one, the creative impetuosity of artists is the epidemic of the period in which our history transforms into a commercial society”.5 Another criticism was that Political Pop indulged America’s Cold War strategic need to suppress China.6 Great Criticism became famous because of its classification as Political Pop, but it inevitably paid the price of such fame: a misreading of its practices based on old methodology. One could venture that this classification by critics of Great Criticism mostly results from the habit of extracting Wang Guangyi from the developmental logic of his own personal art history, as well as from the context of modern Chinese art. In an article about the birth, characteristics and development of Chinese Pop Art I proposed that: The Pop art that arose in post-war America had two distinct backgrounds, one in cultural history and one in art history. The first refers to the nourishment it garnered from the mass-popularization and utilitarian aesthetic tradition of American culture, and was a physical reaction to the fragmented, superficial, trivial consumer culture that emerged after the Second World War. The second established the rejection of the elitist styles of modernism such as Abstract Expressionism. Warhol’s visit to Chi38
Andy Warhol in Tian An Men square, Beijing, 1982 Photo Christopher Makos