MADRID, SPAIN.- Dolores de Sierra Gallery presents “Luo Brothers – Chinese Pop Art”, on view through 5 January 2008. Putting it as simply as possible, the pictorial work of the Luo brothers is based on a random combination of a few images, highly representative of traditional Chinese identity, with a certain class of global icon, infiltrated by Western consumerism, which, penetrating the last bastions of any ancient culture, becomes synonymous with the latter’s opening up and progress.

Employing equal amounts of irony and humour, and intentionally brushing the surface of the abusive aesthetics of Kitsch, these Chinese artists are fully aware of what they are handling and how to expose it to our summary judgement. Nothing less than the plagiaristic aesthetics of Pop and the colours of the Chinese flag are the arms they use to defend falsely naïve reflections which display an ever eloquent capacity to mock the shadow projected by their own myths.

The official photo of the very palace in Tiananmen (which means “Heavenly Gate” in Chinese) with those rubicund cherubs flying around above every scene, as if they intended to provoke sudden illumination at a mere glance. Inflamed reds and yellows accentuate that perverse goodness which they use to invent this impossible Chinese landscape, where Mao’s bust can coexist peacefully with hamburgers, and multicoloured fish, paper flowers, cats and kimonos with “fast food” and the outline of the world’s most famous bottle.

A very curious interchange of symbols is that employed by these amusing brothers, who appear to have fathomed how to make certain topics into the tip of an iceberg of serious reflection about the considerable changes which explain how wise and ancient China can today also be a paradise for those new tourists who may wish to see Chinese puppet theatre straight after buying themselves a “fake”.

As if the romantic China depicted in the novels of Pearl S. Buck, were now simply the repentant echo of a thousand centuries of introspection, the images of the Luo brothers convert present-day transformations of modern lotus flower society into a kind of surprisingly infantile charade, where Pop, the most popular language in the West, becomes a comfortable tool for deploying all the exquisite weapons of an artistic know-how undoubtedly indebted to traditional Chinese artistry and craftsmanship. It is no surprise that painting and ceramics, the most ancient arts in this land of the rising Sun, should be the technical basis for these alchemists of image, who also dare to depict the most provocative scenarios for modern China using industrial resin.

Imitating those artists who knew how to distinguish the deeply representative elements of the culture of snobbery that was Pop Art, the Luo brothers developed, almost as part of a “marketing” operation, their own particular brand of criticism aimed at both pacific Western invasion through powerful multinationals and the highly permeable society of their origins, almost desirous of “Cultural Colonization”.

And if the Hamiltons, Warhols or Lichtensteins of this world found inspiration for challenging the existentialist pessimism of fifties’ art through photos of their myths, soup cans or comic vignettes, the Luo brothers have discovered in that “Heavenly Gate”, which represents the core of China’s old guard, as in the portrait of that reluctant “god”, that was President Mao, and in numerous accompanying motifs (almost all of them trivial), equivalent visual devices that herald and exemplify the collision between two aesthetic concepts and two worlds paradoxically destined to meet.

This multi-coloured and fantastic mixture can only function as a powerful metaphor, an image analogy of a very special global moment, a time which opens up a future in which perhaps everything can be bought, sold or exchanged, an age where no one is safe even from himself, but where the hope of inventing one’s own custom-built paradise will always remain. Pilar Ribal i Simó.