Us, Them – On the Art of Guangci and Xiang Jing

in the 1980s, Guangci’s works have always been concerned with this central question of collective image. Over many years, his work can be seen as creating imagery for “us.” As carriers of revolution, class symbols, and emblems of the people, images of workers-peasants-soldiers had lost their power by the 1990s. For Guangci, these are but symbols of the collective that can be summarily used and consumed, a sort of historical readymade object.
In recent years, Guangci has repeatedly used images of monuments culled from modern Chinese history in his work. From standard heroic sculptures of Mao to every sort of worker-peasant-soldier sculptures, all offer Guangci a space for appropriation, distortion, and subversion. In the middle of the twentieth century, these images were erected in public squares all across China, becoming an integral part of Chinese revolutionary culture, a testimony to people’s memory and evidence of history. We must understand that Guangci’s own life was not drastically influenced by the events of the Cultural Revolution, and so any connections between him and the vague history of the Cultural Revolution exist only in these suspicious images and vestiges. As he was growing up, society began to develop, and these forms and traces gradually grew more and more ambiguous. They still exist on public squares around the country, but the ideals behind them have long ceased to exist. And yet the period of history which they carry and express is precisely that which people wish to delete from their memory. These are bodies now devoid of life and power, still floating on the scene of contemporary urban life, like actors that have not retreated from a stage even though their performance is long over. The next performance has already begun, and still they have not exited. They awkwardly sit in every corner of the city (if they have not been torn down already) like tourists who have forgotten their destination, or suitcases resting forlorn on a train platform. In the mid-1990s, Guangci turned his eye toward these public icons that have lost their public nature, these now-empty historical trajectories, these remains that have since been obliterated from social life.
Speaking more accurately, what Guangci aims to create is a series of “anti-monuments.” In his work 2002 AD, the image of Mao appears not as a