Wu Shaoxiang Biography

Wu only attended school until the age of 12, after which point he worked as a labourer sawing wood and laying bricks. He put those technical skills to use in his early 20s, when he studied sculpture at the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute in the Jiangxi province. After graduating, Wu moved to Beijing where he won the Beijing Art and Design Scholarship—the first scholarship of its kind to be awarded in the city—and continued his studies under the sculptor Zheng Ke at the Central Academy of Arts & Design (now the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University). It was here in the capital that he became part of the '85 New Wave Movement, which saw Chinese artists reacting to state-sanctioned Socialist Realist traditions with provocative and avantgarde approaches.

Wu's early works are notable for their combination of Western and Eastern influences. Works in his early 'Outcry' series, for example, were initiated in the mid-1980s, made mostly from polished, cast copper, and depicted abstracted female forms. The works had explicitly sexual undertones that notably did not appear in the popular art in China at the time, earning Wu the reputation of a rebel. More subdued pieces such as Cap (1988) belied Wu's interest in the works of Henry Moore and Constantin Brancusi, with their smooth, rounded figurative forms and hollow openings.

In 1989—during catastrophic pro-Democracy protests in Beijing—Wu and his wife, sculptor Jiang Shuo (蒋朔), moved to Austria to establish a joint studio. There, Wu found a liberal environment in which to work, in stark contrast to the more conservative atmosphere in China.

Having left his home country before its rapid economic development, living in Europe exposed Wu to the disheartening effects that late capitalism can have on the production and circulation of art. In response to this, money became a notable theme in Wu's work. Since his 'Coin Series', begun in 1992, Wu has been using money—particularly coins—as a medium. For Coining MoMA—his 2001 solo exhibition at Plum Blossoms in New York—Wu approximated famous works from The Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection in welded coins. His tongue-in-cheek gesture pointed to the way that public art institutions, though they may aim to appear independent of capitalistic forces, are largely business- and money-driven.

Similarly concerned with the social effects of affluence, Wu's 'Walking Wealth' series continues to use the image of money as a medium. The 2008 bronze sculpture Apple (2008), for example, depicts the fruit made of USD 100 bills. Symbol of Love—made in the same year—comprises a grouping of small porcelain hearts, stars and spheres glazed with a currency pattern, while the bronze sculpture The Thinker, No. 1 (2014) depicts Rodin's famous figure sitting atop a tower made of shining USD bills, reflecting Wu's regret that canonised works of art have been divorced from their original meanings in order to function as mere symbols of 'high' culture.

Harking back to his childhood during the Cultural Revolution, Wu's 2007 sculpture I love M is a bust of Chairman Mao atop a plinth engraved with the McDonalds logo. As a comment on the effects of global capitalism, the work points to the way political figures such as Mao become washed and distilled into recognisable symbols over time.

Elliat Albrecht | Ocula | 2018