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This is the second 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, James Cook from the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh, explores 21st Century Beijing and explains the impact of time and place on artistic production and the relationship between art, commerce, and politics.

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 James Cooke from the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh explores 21st century Beijing and explains the impact of time and place on artistic production and the relationship between art, commerce, and politics.

Since Warhol is more widely known in China, is there more of an impact of his depiction of Mao?

James Cooke: If those works had been displayed in ’71, ’72, people would have literally lost their head. Interestingly enough I think the way in which these pieces were reintroduced into China was when The Rolling Stones played in China and I think that was something like 2012, and they took sort of a Warholesque kind of picture of Mao and stuck The Rolling Stones’s long tongue on front of that poster.

Student: Oh, my God.

James Cooke: And so they get up on stage—there’s Keith and Mick, and I’ll have to check the date when they played, but you can find it on Wikipedia or—and they got this picture there, and there’s all these Chinese reporters sitting there looking at this painting and thinking, What the [guttural grunt, mimics censoring of profanity] are they doing here? They were dumbfounded that this could—that this kind of presentation of Mao could exist. Now to me it was very recognizable soon as I saw it. That’s the famous Warhol print, and there’s The Rolling Stones’ big tongue sticking out of his mouth, and I think that reintroduction of the print really began to get people to talk about it once again. And I also recall that the print received, or the poster or the image, received a tremendous amount of press coverage, but particularly in the English language newspapers that cater to both the non-Chinese or foreign residents of Beijing and then also very educated Chinese who have dual language capabilities, and so even though for example People’s Daily didn’t really talk very much about the news conference of The Rolling Stones, yet we see sort of front page coverage in other newspapers at that point in time were—still had a very, very large or a very big circulation in China.

So I think there was also some discussion of maybe at one point, as I recall, putting up the Warhol image in Tiananmen Square. I know that that was—that ran into difficulties with the leadership of the Communist party. I think that today many young people will know of these images, but they are not going to be something that you find too many kids wearing as T-shirts into their high school, so to speak.

Host: Can you talk about the impact of time and place on the artistic production and the correlation between art, commerce, and politics in relationship to 21st century Beijing?

James Cooke: For us to understand the production of art and modern day Beijing we have to keep in mind the tremendous economic and cultural forces that have been buffeting the city over the past three decades, and the fact that the Beijing that emerged out of the end of the Maoist era in 1976 and the Beijing that you see today is really a very, very different place. And I think when you look at some of the works that are going to be exhibited at the Warhol, you can really begin to see how they are connected to Ai Weiwei’s work. So the 1985–86 works focus on Mao, and we see there very much a China that is just beginning to emerge from his shadow, and in 1985–86 Beijing was still a very rudimentary city. Most people rode on bicycles to get around, there were very few cars or they used buses. They had one very basic subway line, and most buildings were generally no higher than five floors in height because that was the maximum you could walk up on foot using stairs.  Now of course there were exceptions to that rule, particularly in the downtown areas, but for the most part it was a city that was still developing along the socialist forms of city planning that had been established in the 1950s, the ring road concept and all of these planning ideas had come from the Soviet Union during that time period.

And then we kind of look at his work in 2016, he has that Beijing second ring road photograph with tremendous amounts of traffic and sort of the air pollution in the background, though even at that point in time it still even wasn’t really terrible. But you begin to see at that point in time as you get closer to the Olympics a China that is now beginning to set foot on the world stage, to be a much greater player in international events, and as a part of that whole process the Beijing that existed in ’85-’86 20 years later is being torn down and reconstructed.

So for example, when I was a student at Peking University up in the northwest portions of the city, the area right outside of the walls that surrounded the university was basically built up of small apartment buildings and shops and restaurants, and my favorite restaurant was Sichuan Restaurant Number 7, that’s how they were called in socialist China, and today when you walk into that area it is essentially filled with the fourth ring road, a dramatic 12-lane highway—six lanes going in each direction—and since that time they’ve built a fifth ring road and they’re working on a sixth ring road right now.

So Beijing has now grown into a city of 20 million people, and as part of that development we see a China today that is much more willing to display what being modern and Chinese is, and in some ways we see that with the development of the city itself, but also now in the art world. And I can recall going to art shows when I was a graduate student in Beijing, many of them at the Beijing Exhibition Hall near the zoo, which was designed by Soviet Union planners, and here we have in this sort of very Stalinist kind of building an attempt to recreate or to develop modern Chinese art. Today now you can for example take a bus to, I wouldn’t call it the outskirts of Beijing but this area between the third and the fourth ring roads, and there is this giant artists’ complex—I wouldn’t call it a colony because it is very commercialized. It draws people in from all over the world, and they’re there to buy things. And the prices of these paintings and the artwork that is now for sale is expensive. And I think in part this is due to the value that we find being attached to modern Chinese art, and in many ways I think this is partly due to the recognition of the role that China is playing globally in the 21st century, which is a very, very different role that China played in 1985.

His most recent work, we see that surveillance camera, we see the wooden handcuffs, we see the jade handcuffs, those speak particularly to, I think, the more statused orientations of the modern Chinese Communist party, one in which obviously cities have been essentially rewired in order to be able to observe, police, and survey this massive population.

Host: Join us for scene three of this podcast where we interview Eric Shiner, director of The Andy Warhol Museum.

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