Red Salon: Pu Yingwei
RED ALERT
Pu Yingwei’s image-packed paintings and installations give Western viewers a hint of the jarring, culturally hybrid experience of contemporary China. Moreover, this multi-sourced, polyvalent aesthetic seems to express a neo-Cold War global condition, present and future. This is Tomorrowland, his work implies, and we are all in it together.
Pu Yingwei was born in 1989 (the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre) in Taiyuan, the capital of a north-central coalmining region filled with ancient architecture and murals. Raised in mid-level social circumstances—his father is a civil servant, his mother a doctor—he earned a BFA from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2013 and a DNSEP from L’École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon in 2018. Since then, he has exhibited widely in venues such as the Beijing International Art Biennial, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, the Shanghai Biennale, and the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand.
From 2021 to 2023, the young artist traveled through Eastern Europe, Africa, Central and Southeastern Asia, and the United States. Hence a wanderer’s mental souvenir-gathering informs his image mélanges even today. To date, his oeuvre, like his vagabond enchantment, has passed through three major phases, often intermingled in his exhibitions.
The “ChinaCapital” works (2019-present) reflect one of the most stupendous socioeconomic reforms in human history. Faced with the disaster of Mao Zedong’s ruthless collectivization—some 15 to 55 million people starved to death during the so-called Great Leap Forward (1959-62)—his second successor, Deng Xiaoping, instituted a form of state capitalism that soon supercharged the Chinese economy. Between 1978 and 1992, the country’s GDP nearly quadrupled; by 2020, some 800 million people had been lifted out of poverty. Shenzhen, a fishing village when Deng designated it a Special Economic Zone in 1980, transformed over the next 30 years into a futuristic metropolis that now produces 70 percent of the world’s smartphones. One company based there, Huawei, frequently outsells Disney and Nike combined. This new era of “market socialism” or “socialism with Chinese characteristics” made millionaires. China currently boasts about 6.5 million High Net Worth Individuals, more than double the number in France and second only to the US’s 23.5 million.
Pu Yingwei’s “ChinaCapital” pieces, as slick-surfaced as advertising, recall the satiric wealth-dazzled exuberance of the original post-Mao avant-garde. Calligraphic characters, clenched fists (familiar from old-school propaganda art), and five-pointed Communist Party stars are treated like Pop motifs. The script of the ubiquitous ChinaCapital logo is appropriated, Wang Guangyi-style, from Coca-Cola. The jumbled density of objects and words in Pu Yingwei’s installations is worthy of Wu Shanzhuan. The floor of Pu Yingwei’s booth at the 2026 Independent Art Fair in New York was strewn with fake currency—a gesture that the madcap Xu Zhen, or even Ai Weiwei, might well envy.
Works under the “ChinAfrica” rubric (2015-23) take their impetus from Deng Xiaoping’s other world-changing initiative, the Great Opening Up. Beginning in 1949, Mao had closed China to most foreigners—a move that recapitulated the stance of late imperial China, until it was forced open by Western nations in the 19th century. Deng, however, welcomed outside influences and global trade, again to galvanizing effect as foreign goods, information, technology, and people poured into China.
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Richard Vine
