ChinaCapital: Dream, Hot Land, Interstellar Colonization

2020 - Painting (Painting)
100 x 170 cm

ChinaCapital: Dream, Hot Land, Interstellar Colonization by Pu Yingwei addresses a complicated phenomena of intertwined influences from different political powers, capital forces, and ideologies in the reality of China. The background of this painting is taken from an image of a Russian stamp featuring a space odyssey during the Cold War with the US. The composition juxtaposes colors from the Chinese national flag (red and yellow) and the US national flag (blue and red), echoing the current “cold war” between China and the U. S. Usually found surrounding a big star on the Chinese national flag, the 4 stars are here rearranged into a single line, symbolizing the artist’s wish for a decentralised and equal society. The work also echoes the Political Pop movement in the 80s in China. Some of the words legible in the painting use the font called the ”Revolutionary Realism Font,” a font the artist invented combining Chinese characters, English letters, Soviet Russian letters, and other elements and symbols. The font symbolizes the situation of China under the influences of local agents (China), global context (US), and pre-socialism Utopian Heritage (Russia) as well as the special visual form of “China” born under the influence of multiple histories and ideologies. For example, one can read the words “China Capital,” which borrows the design of “Coca Cola” introduced to China in 1979, an early example of western capitalism entering the market on the mainland. The ”Revolutionary Realism Font” can be downloaded and applied to any software and any design purpose.

Working as an artist, writer and curator, Pu Yingwei’s practice addresses key issues of our contemporary world linked to collective memory, personal history, utopia, identity, and geopolitics. For him, individual experiences and memories have indeed shaped the world around us and thus need consideration when tackling global key issues. Through various forms–including exhibition, writing, publishing and lecturing– he revisits and parodies political and historical texts and explores how political power and ideology shape our reality through art, architecture, and capital distribution.

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