Wang Mai

At age 37, Wang Mai occupies a prominent place among artists who—in great numbers worldwide—have drawn from comic books and animated film to develop a new esthetic that fuses serious social concerns with deliberately “immature” tastes in design, facture, and subject matter. This refusal to grow up, sometimes referred to as the “Peter Pan syndrome,” can pose a problem to viewers and critics accustomed to more obviously earnest or more pointedly ironic work. Wang’s drawings, paintings, assemblage sculptures, and performances force commentators to confront one of the fundamental tenets of contemporary art and thought—the idea that progressive work always looks disconcerting unlike “real art” at the outset, becoming assimilated only as its premises and techniques win out against calcified perceptions. Critics are supposed to be the allies of advanced artists in this endeavor, champions who carry to fight to the institutions and the masses, explaining seemingly outlandish work with such clarity and verbal sympathy that it eventually becomes the artistic norm.

In practice, though, something rather different usually takes place. Critics and curators, by and large, choose to discuss work they already find visually and intellectually congenial. Seldom do they put themselves through the conversion experience they routinely prescribe for the general public. Moreover, the dread of being old-fashioned—on a par with those who scoffed at Impressionism at its inception or who lambasted the Armory Show in 1913—is so severe that today’s art-world professionals seldom, if ever, admit to being personally baffled or offended by any new artistic development, no matter how bizarre. Yet Wang’s work, like the entire movement of which it is a part, has encountered significant critical resistance. His doll-like figures, candy colors, and cartoon-simple vignettes have elicited charges of mere silliness—an indication, perhaps, that they represent a genuine cultural shift. To some degree, the split is generational. Commentators who are Wang’s age and younger have little trouble accepting this highly graphic esthetic; those who are older tend to lament it as infantilization of a once elevated calling. But the dispute is also philosophical, and to understand it fully we must first recall how this global phenomenon arose.

Essentially, a funny thing happened on the way to modernism. In a revolt against the stifling Academic rules and values, many of the most talented artists of the early 20th century sought inspiration from sources outside the approved “civilized” canon. Some embraced theosophy or other forms of esoteric spiritualism, but many more, especially after Picasso revealed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, began to seek inspiration from “primitive” influences: tribal peoples, the insane, and children.

The liking of those three, suddenly seen as wellsprings of psychic energy and formal expressiveness, would have astounded earlier generations, for whom childhood, in its ideal mode, was a golden interlude of innocence, pleasure, and easy affection. (That this construct coexisted with the harsh realities of child labor and juvenile prostitution was one of the late-19th-century hypocrisies that modernism aimed to expose.) Rousseau, writing in the 18th century, argued that children were born good, like the “noble savage” of his foundational myth, and could therefore be readily, almost intuitively, inculcated with sound moral principles derived from Nature.

This was the very antithesis of the orthodox Christian concept of original sin, which views all human beings as innately flawed and in dire need of Divine mercy and moral discipline. The Industrial Revolution created a population of poor working (or sometimes begging) youths, drawn away from both home and school, whose lives severely challenged Victorian sentiments regarding the Innocent Child. In the early 20th century, Sigmund Freud, psychoanalyzing bourgeois patients, restored the taint of sin to youthful urges that might, if not properly channeled, lead to adult neurosis—the dark secret of childhood sexual pleasure and Oedipal lust.

For the most part, the childlike qualities cultivated by high-modern artists like Miro was a matter of formal vivification. They hoped to free up and energize their compositions through the adoption of bright hues, radically simplified forms, elemental themes, and directly expressive surfaces and lines. Only in the historic byways did the darker juvenile modes emerge: in certain erotically charged strains of advertising and, consequently, some Pop art; in psychedelic work conveying the mental and sexual liberation of the 1960s; in Chicago Imagism, with its childhood-trauma-inflected scenes of brutal violence, outlandish humor and raw sex.

Probably no one, from either camp of modernist childlikeness, could have predicted the international wave of esthetic fashion that has swept artists like Wang Mai to the forefront of critical consciousness. The point of origin for this movement was postwar Japan. Although Mediterranean countries and South America have strong graphic-novel traditions, and the United States has supported a flourishing comic-book trade as well as the animated-film innovations of Walt Disney, it was in Japan that horror, fantasy, sex and humor wed most memorably. Indeed, the last three elements could be seen as coping mechanism for the collective horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The monsters that arose in Japanese popular imagination—Godzilla, Mothra, and a host of others—often grew to their stupendous proportions when atomic waste interacted with a (sometimes prehistoric) animal zygote, much as Western technology interacted with Eastern folktales to create the iconography of the genre. (Fear and resentment of overwhelming Western power—linked to a culture not-so-secretly loved and admired in other respects—was matched by historical recollection of a Japanese imperialism itself gone mad.)

Perhaps this is why robots have been so central to what Chinese curator Victoria Lu has dubbed the “animamix” movement. With their relative lack of personal characteristics, and their clockwork dedication to functions prescribed by mentally superior human beings (against whom they occasionally rebel), these mechanical beings are a high-tech extrapolation into the future of the social regimentation, the unquestioning obedience, once demanded by Eastern warlords and emperors, as well as by today’s corporate managers of the new economic world order.

At the same time, the cuteness of so many manga and anime characters is a dual provocation. On the one hand, it solicits an immediate sympathy from viewers, as the vulnerability of lovely, seemingly helpless young creatures calls forth protectiveness—yet that noble response often comes accompanied by its own contradiction, especially when those creatures are attractive pubescent girls. That fusion of paternal care and insidious lust has fueled a major marketing trend throughout much of Asia since the 1970s. Wang Mai is clearly aware of this dynamic, as he is of the other subliminal components of animamix, when he composes his satires on the propaganda of capitalism.

The artist comes by such dualism naturally. Born in 1972, when the Cultural Revolution was in grim force, he grew up in of era of liberalization, economic growth, and mounting optimism initiated by Deng Xiaoping at the end of that decade. His home province, Heilongjiang, is situated in extreme northeast of China, bordering Russia. A major source of coal, oil, and lumber, it is remembered by Wang Mai for the forests surrounding his birthplace, Yi Chun, where the sound of wood-chopping could be heard year round. At the same time, the romance of futurism—particularly space travel—was readily available in the form of popular publications like Science Pictorial for Children. In Wang Mai’s mind, the youthful protagonists of these happy tales merged with child temple figures, infant-shaped Song dynasty porcelain pillows, and joyful, pink-cheeked calendar kids drawn to evoke traditional associations with prosperity and spiritual blessings.

Although he did not attend a university or an art school, the young man made himself into a skilled calligrapher and moved, in turn, to Beijing’s famous Yuanmingyuan and Tong County artist villages. There he spent the early 1990s reading widely, conversing with avant-garde artists, and—unrestricted by academic instruction—developing his own powers of direct observation. Among his colleagues were Qi Zhilong, Liu Ye, Zhao Bandi, Yue Minjun, and especially Yang Shaobin (with whom he has collaborated). His earliest artworks were paintings and performances, but around 2000 he made the chance discovery of some old wooden molds in the derelict factory spaces of the 798 complex. The area, then his third successive abode, was just beginning its transformation into a freewheeling center for the production and sale of art, and the lucky find prompted Wang Mai to begin producing the assemblage sculptures for which he is now widely known.

The artist’s early works, created in the aftermath of the events of 1989, often dealt with issues of authenticity. Some asked what, in a mass-media era, was “real” about official observances (for example, the group performances Spring Festival Evening Party and May 1 International Labor Day, both 1999), individual identity (“The Cloning Family” paintings), or even the various forms of Chinese art, language and writing (as in the series “The Emperor of Hui at 798,” 2003-04). His wooden sculpture Memorial Stele Enters the Pagoda (2003) features a phallic stele, taller than a person and carved with TV-show scenes, that slip easily inside a pagoda-like casing, implying perhaps that pop-cultural values have today invaded the most sacred precincts.

Clearly, serious issues are addressed in these pieces, and some of the works—in the early days—were slated for group shows that ended up being prohibited. But it would be a great error to overlook the sheer comic exuberance that pervades Wang Mai’s oeuvre. For every drawing on a leftover shop diagram, referencing 798’s former role as a munitions center, there is a painting of a smiling child-astronaut “bodisattva”; for every dangerous-looking painted tiger (sometimes with the head of Marx), one finds an image of the U.S. space shuttle soaring toward the stars. Indeed, the artist—with his vitalism and humor—repeatedly suggests that wisdom entails deep social concern offset by a personal light-heartedness.

This is certainly the sense that pervades his recent signature works dealing with global oil issues. Following the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, Wang Mai began reading about the Middle East and, inevitably, petroleum. He was soon shocked to learn the extent to which the unquenchable thirst for oil in developed countries drives foreign-policy decisions all over the world. The effect of drilling and pipelining on the natural environment, the making of strange political bedfellows (the liberal U.S. cozying up to the ultraconservative Islamic state of Saudi Arabia, for example), and the real but unacknowledged motivation for wars and occupations in the Middle East—all these play darkly upon the artist’s imagination. But particularly disturbing—in his view, at least—is the allegation that the United States has sought, through business dealings and national diplomacy as well as though massive military deployments, to gain the ability to choke off major oil supplies to China in the event of a high-level confrontation between the two powers. This somewhat paranoid scenario is far from implausible in light of the Opium Wars of the 19th century and the destruction of Beijing’s imperial Summer Palace by Western forces in the very environs where Wang Mai and his friends later pitched their artist community.

Such specific fear ties into a more general distrust of unrestrained technological advancement. “Science has become the giant monster of our time, and is becoming stronger and uncontrollable,” the artist wrote in the 2006 Wang Mai catalogue from Kwai Fung Art Publishing House, Hong Kong. “Today, it is becoming an embodiment of unquestionable truth, a new religion and an absolute belief.” No doubt this is why Wang Mai has made many sculptural version of a “petroleum monster” that a childlike human figure attempts to ride or otherwise subdue. Simultaneously, he has produced many painted images of Uday Hussein, the son of oil-rich Iraq’s onetime dictator, surrounded by emblems of wealth and strength (necklaces, hammers, CDs, etc.): an ironic gesture, given that father and son—both victimizers and victims in the oil wars of our time—have now paid with their lives for the autocratic power they once wielded.

Wang Mai’s young hero confronts—and sometimes turns to his own advantage—myriad symbols of international, government-assisted, oil corporations: barrels, pipeline, company logos, gas stations, automobiles, and a ravenous, sharp-toothed mouth with lolling tongue at the end of open conduits. On his side he has only the weight of preindustrial history (since he is formally reminiscent of doll-like wooden figures from the Tang dynasty and earlier) and certain still-surviving folk-cultural elements such as glass antlers and/or attendant flying figures, dog companions, and carved-walnut plating on his body and the pipes he straddles. (Wood, we remember, is a venerated building material in Chinese tradition, and physical substance associated with benevolence in Confucian thought.) Occasionally, as though stealing arrows from the enemy, a space helmet and jetpack are added to the little protagonist’s arsenal.

With merely these small individual “weapons,” can the innocent boy somehow magically tame the global petroleum monster? It is a question straight from cartoon land, and a reminder of Wang Mai’s most persistent theme: the ridiculousness of collective hubris, no matter how technologically sophisticated its expression, and the moral seriousness of humor when applied to fundamental questions of the human condition.