Wang Guangyi is known for being the leader of the New Art Movement circles that erupted out of China after 1989 and for being one of the Political Pop movment pioneers.  By using images of propaganda from the Cultural Revolution and contemporary brand names from western advertising Wang takes his pop- art directly into political- pop with depictions of Mao and Cultural Revolution figures, appropriating the visual iconography of both the Chinese Cultural Revolution and American pop art.
His paintings are meant to show that though the two systems are not united, the principal goal of each is to convince the population of the authenticity and singularity of its products. The artistic strategy produces imagery on different levels, both symbolic and real, visualizing and actively counteracting key economic paradigms and their social and cultural implications. He employs a variety of media ranging from installation art, mixed media imagery to sculpture, but it was his series of oil paintings entitled "Great Criticism" that earned him fame. On a surface level, these pictures resemble the technique and aesthetics of Warhol's pop icons, but their inherent contents are extremely sophisticated fusions of different belief systems: that is, socialism and consumerism. By merging and blending these two opposite phenomena, he, thus, negates both. Wang Guangyi combines disparate and seemingly disconnected images, attempting to show how inexorably they become visually composed, interpreted through a consensual frame that, then, domesticates and homogenizes them.