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

great, heroic monument, but rather, returned to an ordinary life-sized object. Covered in plaster, it becomes vague and uncertain. This handling makes Mao appear even more ambiguous, almost mass-produced, becoming a quantifiably random product. The concept of the “anti-monument” resonates with doubt and subversions of the “immortal.” In works such as Democracy Box and Monument Column and in the large-scale installation, Chinese Century Train, Guangci uses translucent resin to produce a series of “Mao-style” crystal coffins, in which he inserts human figures of different colors. This symbol of “immortality” becomes a cheap sitcom-style prop. Around 2004, Guangci produced a series of massive revolutionary monuments, replacing the customary granite with shiny stainless steel. This work successfully plays on the Chinese homophone “buxiu” which means both “immortality” and “stainless” as a way of ridiculing the unattainable ideal of immortality. Stainless steel, as a commercial commodity that had not yet come into use during the Maoist era, has now become a staple of lowbrow public art. Since the 1980s, public sculptures in stainless steel have been produced at surprising proportions, and have gradually swallowed up the spaces formerly allotted to monuments. These new sculptures are replacements for the revolutionary monuments of the past, but like their predecessors, they are also monuments to a sort of “pseudo-public.” When the forms of revolutionary monuments meet the materiality of stainless steel, the resulting strange combination is ahistorical, and from a certain standpoint, this is the major strand of thinking behind China’s “political pop” art. Importantly, the special characteristics of stainless steel transmutes abstract ideas of class into a hollow monument, bright and beautiful, as if forming a complex mirror which absorbs the everyday living environment whole cloth, mutating it to fit the form of the revolutionary.
Guangci has taken readymade images from history and incorporated them into the fabric of contemporary everyday life. This is a kind of dislocation, or to use Guangci’s own words, a “positioning.” Guangci has said: “Positioning can make the meaningful meaningless, and the meaningless meaningful… the joys and tragedies encountered by monumental sculpture have largely to do with mistakes in