Square
Wu Junyong
吴俊勇
Production date
2008
Object Detail
Media
oil on canvas
Measurements
40 x 40 cm
Notes
Wu Junyong loves fables, fairytales and parables, and his paintings are similarly coded moral tales. He casts his sharply critical eye on the ills of contemporary society – brazen corruption, the misuse of power, scam artists and greed – and creates allegories that represent today’s most pressing issues in a coded language of symbolism. Here his recurring character of the man wearing the dunce’s hat, or ‘gao maozi’ appears like a tiny puppet emerging from beneath a flagstone. The work is a coded commentary on China’s increasingly tightly censored online environment. The flagstones seem geometrically neat and ordered but there are anarchic and rebellious things happening beneath them. Wu asks: what lies beneath the veneer of harmony and order?
Accession number
2009.054