Polit-Sheer-Form Office, Polit-Sheer-Form-16, oil on canvas, 2007. Courtesy of MABSOCIETY.
What happens when socialism meets marketing? That question-gnawing at the heart of China today-is implicitly addressed by Polit-Sheer-Form-Office (PSFO), a collective of four established Chinese artists (Hong Hao, Xiao Yu, Song Dong and Liu Jianhua) and one curator-Leng Lin, who currently heads Pace Gallery Beijing. On Nov. 3, the group rallied 400 supporters to mop a section of Times Square-supposedly a selfless civic gesture, but one obsessively documented by social-media users, photographers and videomakers. The result? Publicity on the spot, plus rich material for the slick, advertising-style videos that PSFO produces for gallery display. The irony is no doubt intentional, given that all five members began their careers at a time when avant-garde Chinese artists often banded together in a struggle to survive. Yet they now prosper in an era of individual art-stardom. At the Queens Museum opening, the boys hammered their way through a wall to the cheers of supporters, who then encountered vitrines filled with daily-life debris (ticket stubs, snack packaging, paper napkins, etc.) and a library of 10,000 identical volumes, each blue (not Mao red) inside and out.