Within China’s avant-garde movement in the 1990s, Yu Youhan is widely known and celebrated as the father of abstract painting and Political Pop. As an art teacher in Shanghai, he quickly dismissed the pursuit of interdisciplinary and international practices that many artists were adopting at that time and inspired experimentation in the appropriation of conventional communist imagery with Western and domestic “pop” forms.

In his highly-acclaimed Mao series consisting of portrait-like depictions of the leader, Yu Youhan often sets out to explore the connotations behind these culturally poignant icons. In this work, Untitled, Yu Youhan adopts two highly identifiable and politically powerful images to demonstrate the language of visual propaganda and the associations they conjure up during the visual experience.