Engaged with Communist Visual Culture

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Communist states built a distinctive visual language: red stars, heroic workers and peasants, leaders' portraits and slogans in bold type. In Soviet Russia, Dmitry Moor's poster Have You Volunteered? (1920) jabbed a finger at the viewer, and Vera Mukhina's stainless-steel Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (1937) crowned the Soviet pavilion at the Paris World's Fair. China under Mao Zedong mass-produced its own imagery, above all during the Cultural Revolution.

Artists who grew up with this language later took it apart. In Moscow in the early 1970s, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid named their parody of official art Sots Art, and Erik Bulatov set propaganda slogans against painted skies. In China after 1989, Political Pop mixed Mao-era images with consumer culture: Wang Guangyi's Great Criticism series shows Red Guards alongside brand names such as Coca-Cola, and Yu Youhan and Li Shan turned Mao's portrait into decorative Pop.