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This is the first post in a series of podcasts produced about The Warhol’s exhibition Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei.

These podcasts were produced by The Andy Warhol Museum in collaboration with the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh to coincide with Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei, a major international exhibition featuring two significant artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Interviews with professors, researchers, artists, and museum staff were conducted by high school students at the Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts School (CAPA) to help provide historical and cultural context for the exhibition. CAPA students Will Dowd and Anthony Quesen both edited and produced the final podcasts.

In this podcast, research professor Gao Minglu from the University of Pittsburgh discusses Ai’s background and how both Warhol and Ai transformed the understanding of artistic value and studio production.

Audio transcript

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Host: Hello, and welcome to Capitalism/Communism: A Way of Life, the podcast that brings you inside information on the Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei exhibition.

Announcer: These podcasts were produced by The Andy Warhol Museum in collaboration with the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh, to coincide with the Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei, a major international exhibition featuring two significant artists from the 20th and 21st centuries. Interviews with professors, researchers, artists and museum staff were conducted by high school students at the Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts School to help provide historical and cultural context for the exhibition.

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Host: In this podcast research professor Gao Minglu from the University of Pittsburgh discusses Ai Weiwei’s background and how both Warhol and Weiwei transformed the understanding of artistic value and studio production.

What was the impact when Ai Weiwei helped to publicize the work of Beuys, Duchamp, and Andy Warhol in China in the mid-1990s?

Gao Minglu: Actually Warhol and Duchamp were already quite popular during the 1980s. For example, Duchamp is a really influential figure in south China, southeast coast, on south China. There was a group called Xiamen Dada. This group, the leading figure of the group is Huang Ping, and he actually moved to Paris in the late 1980s, 1989. And he tried to combine Duchamp, this so-called Dada, and Chinese, postmodern Chinese Buddhism, Zen Buddhism. It’s postmodern somehow, new kind of a postmodernism. So very influential of Duchamp at that time already.

Warhol began to influence Chinese contemporary artists sometime around 1988, actually, later and later than Duchamp. For example, there’s an artist called Wang Guangyi, who made the Political Pop in early 1990s. In 1988 he said that now is the time to move to Warhol, so we have to have abandoned that kind of enthusiasm of humanism and move on to Pop like Warhol.

So you see Duchamp and Warhol are already influential in the ‘80s, but interestingly in early 1990s because the political June 4, Tiananmen, this demonstration garnered protests and demonstration, and they turned to a different kind of situation. There’s no open space for any kind of avant garde like activities in early 1990s, and also Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader, to emphasize no ideology, just economy, so China somehow changed and also draw on this so-called globalization during that period. So art is in this period lacking any opportunity for avant garde artists to have their show and to display their work, create this work in a public space. So Ai Weiwei got a studio and also some artists gathered together in his studio—for example some artists from eastern village, Beijing.

Student: So you said it was ’88 that Warhol started to have a real influence in China and that’s just a year after he died, so was that sort of the catalyst, or why was it ’88?

Gao Minglu: There’s nothing to do with Warhol’s death, it’s just that moment because Pop was not popular, even though influential in 1985, especially after Rauschenberg’s exhibition, sort of, which took this international gathering in Beijing. But still the dominant trend, still kind of painting, two-dimensional or sculpture or something, but Pop is still not that popular as early 1990s, sort of kind of transition from the early avant garde in the mid-1980s to the late avant garde, late ‘80s and early 1990s. So Pop and Warhol played a very important role.

Actually Warhol visit China sometime in early…

Student: Early ‘80s, yeah.

Gao Minglu: Yeah, early ‘80s.  He was very quiet. He just went to the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, and he didn’t take too serious attention on what’s going on in China’s contemporary art, and—so nobody actually knew that, actually. ’88, then Chinese artists start to fascinate them, Warhol’s idea, and his work, and that also pushed the emergence of the Political Pop.

Host: Would Ai Weiwei consider himself more of an activist than an artist, ‘cause Andy Warhol really liked the artist aspect of glorifying fame and like you said trying to get into a philosophical question.

Gao Minglu: Well, first of all, Warhol and German artists, Beuys, is a different kind of artist, right, but somehow Ai Weiwei is a combination of Warhol and Beuys. So Beuys’ slogan, like a social sculptor, political, social sculptor, I think very, very profoundly influenced Ai Weiwei as well. So political sculpture is for Beuys is both sculpture, installation, as well as his embodiment is all corresponding to the current political events, so that for Beuys is very important.

Somehow Ai Weiwei learned this from Beuys—the moment is very important, the political moment. So you have to draw on, you have an immediate response by using your body and your artwork in performance, and as much as possible involve the people, the artist, together, even the police or the garment, include this event as performance. So therefore Ai Weiwei is really, really skillfully played this kind of game, so combination of Beuys’ idea and the Warhol media, social media, and also the action is so important.

Host: Right, as Andy Warhol is more like an observer, whereas Ai Weiwei is in the action, he wants to be part of it.

Gao Minglu: I think for me Andy Warhol is still more conventional in that way, more philosophical than antagonist.  So he still concentrate this somehow still come out from his studio how to develop into this social, bigger, wider space. But Ai Weiwei got the sense from the outside, you know, outside this politically and socially. Now they actually come in the studio, but Ai Weiwei’s very proactive. He can deliver it to use media, use government, use artists to immediately get effect. It doesn’t have any of this kind of shame or hesitate or whatever.

Host: Join us for scene two of this podcast where we interview James Cooke from the Asian Studies Center of the University of Pittsburgh.

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Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei is on view at The Warhol through August 28, 2016.