Party Revisionism

by Michael Kimmelman, New York Times Magazine, on May 31, 2003)

(Wang Qingsong reinterprets a Chinese Masterpiece)

Every few centuries, an artist takes a crack at Gu Hongzhong's "Night Revels of Han Xizai", the 10th century scroll painting about a disillusioned government pooh-bah turned party animal after he failed at imperial reform.

Now comes Wang Qingsong's 31-foot photomural, "Night Revels of Lao Li", the presumptive show stopper for a Chinese survey opening jointly on June 11 at the International Center of Photography and at the Asia Society in New York. Wang replaces Han with a modern curator named Li Xianting, canned as editor of an offical art magazine after championing risky work and today a fixture in bohemian Beijing. Wang's photograph reads as five scenes, bottom right to top left. In Li's final apperance, he gazes sternly at the courtesans whose flimsy outfits allude to Gaudy Art, China's version of Pop, which Li boosted and Wang,a former painter, practises.

Wang casts himself whispering into a cellphone. At 38, he is a rising star with his first solo show in New York, at Salon 94, his style a combustible mix of antiquity, Jeff Koons and Socialist Realism. "Night Revels", shot with a large-format studio camera, the images stitched together digitally, is wry and eye-popping but also a somber metaphor about China's frustrated political progress.

For more information on Wang Qingsong please visit:www.wangqingsong.com

(Wang Qingsong, August 2003)