Chanel, from the Great Criticism series

Wang Guangyi is a founder and leader of the Political Pop movement, one of the most important avant-garde art movements to arise in China during the 1980s and '90s. As the name implies, the Political Pop movement uses pictorial strategies and aesthetic sensibilities developed by American Pop artists of the 1960s and '70s to create images that comment on the political, social, and economic conditions that exist within modern China.

Chanel belongs to Wang's Great Criticism series, the title of which refers to the Cultural Revolution-era practice of publicly criticizing certain individuals and institutions deemed to be incompatible with or insufficiently committed to the ideals of Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party. Here, however, the target of the criticism is the post-Mao Communist state and its attempts to combine a centrally controlled, socialist political system with a free-market, capitalist economy. By ironically juxtaposing 1960s- and '70s-style political propaganda imagery with 1980sand '90s-style consumer advertising imagery, Wang points out the inconsistencies and contradictions inherent in the political and economic ideologies of Deng Xiao ping's China. The painting's critique is deepened by the strings of numbers that cover its surface. According to the artist, these numbers are meant to recall product bar codes, and thus their presence further emphasizes the parallels between propaganda and advertising as equivalent modes of mass culture communication in modern China. The numbers also highlight the painting's status as a commodity and draw attention to the fact that even avant-garde "protest art" has become highly commercialized in post-Tiananmen China.

The AMAM began acquiring examples of contemporary Chinese art in the late 1990s in an effort to keep its Asian collections relevant and up-to-date. At the time, it was one of very few institutions in the United States to collect this type of avant-garde Chinese painting and it is still exceptional among academic art museums in this regard.