In the late ’70s, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s punk culture store Seditionaries was decorated with wallpaper depicting Dresden after it was firebombed by the British during World War II. Michael Wilkinson drew inspiration from the wallpaper for his “Dresden” series, which, despite the name, shows images of his native Liverpool after it had been bombed by the Luftwaffe in 1944.

In a sad coincidence, the day that “Michael Wilkinson: En Attendant” opened at Pearl Lam Gallery in Shanghai — Monday April 15 — was also the day of the Boston Marathon bombings.

In his works, Wilkinson, born in 1965, brings figures from the margins of history into the foreground, focusing on small images taken during big events. “I’ve been interested in looking at the event from the perspective of these people, not the people who write the history books,” he says.

In the show’s title piece, Wilkinson blows up an image of a horse and carriage taken from a 19th century photograph of the Hotel de Ville, Paris, to near life size. The original image shows the building in ruins after it was set on fire by the French Commune, an early proletarian uprising, in 1871.

The exhibition also includes several portraits taken from images of the May 1968 civil unrest in Paris that started with student protests and grew to involve 11 million people. The portraits depict figures so small in the original images that they are reduced to a few Ben-Day dots in the 122x110cm works, which Wilkinson creates by scraping the silver off the back of mirrors.

“History inevitably becomes abstract, and yet it’s totally specific – these particular people were in these particular places,” Wilkinson says. “My works focus on ordinary people in extraordinary situations.”

Speculation about who is responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings, why he/she/they did it, and the broad cultural significance of the event has already begun, but alongside the beginnings of historical abstraction, many heartbreaking stories have already emerged of ordinary people in this extraordinary situation. There’s Emily Locher, for instance, a 37-year-old lawyer who endured a double mastectomy, continuing to train for the race while receiving chemotherapy, before being snapped by Getty photographer Alex Trautwig, hands at her mouth, walking back down the race course to find a friend.

The Boston Globe published a chronological slideshow of race day images taken from Instagram, which shows the expectation and enjoyment of the event giving way to confusion and desperation. These images might appear to be something like found Mark Wilkinson works – ordinary people entering the margins of an event’s historical record. (Of course, the people in the pictures are not just material for artistic appropriation, but neither were the victims of bombing in Liverpool and Dresden.)

Nevertheless, Wilkinson sees a marked distinction between the subjects of his works and images from the Boston Marathon bombings. “The violence portrayed in the images I use is mostly done by representatives of the state on members of the public or shows members of the public resisting that violence. I.e. the theme is that of repression. The only violence that I can think of in any meaningful way is that of resistance to an aggressor. I don’t condone violence per se nor do I think the work I make spectacularizes the violent events it refers to. The images I use are iconic, they refer to significant moments in the history of struggle, the struggle of ordinary people to defend their interests. I can’t see how this relates to bombing innocent people at a sporting event.”

In addition to etching faces of figures from history on mirrors, Wilkinson works with silverers to paint on the back of silver mirrors before removing the unpainted areas with a solvent. Seen from the obverse side, the technique gives the effect of the artist having ‘painted’ with mirror, as if it were just another tube in his box of oils.

Wilkinson’s mirror works spawned from the experience of seeing pop stars’ faces, among them David Bowie’s, printed on mirrors. He became interested in the idea of seeing oneself in the face of one’s idol, the act suggesting a desire to empathize with and emulate them.

British pop, punk and post-punk culture informs much of Wilkinson’s work. Album covers, vinyl records and cassette, VHS, and recording studio tape are all materials he utilizes. A tangle of tape falling from the gallery’s ceiling was inspired, Wilkinson says, by something the Taliban do when they hear Western pop music in an area under their control. They string it up, lynch it, as a declaration that this is Taliban territory, and a warning not to succumb to such blasphemies as Taylor Swift or Rihanna.

“It’s iconoclasm in reverse”, he says, just like the anti-punk, patriotic and parochial reinterpretation of the Dresden wallpaper.

Pink Floyd and their iconic album, “The Wall”, provide especial inspiration for Wilkinson. The exhibition features Lego walls in black, which use new bricks, and white, which, like an assortment of pulled teeth, have yellowed differently over the years. Wilkinson says he observed the same phenomenon with Pink Floyd’s album covers as they age.

“Pink Floyd were massive in Liverpool in the ’80s because all these Scousers smoked a lot of dope on the dockside of the Mersey. I wasn’t one of these people but it really amused me that these lads from council estates were into the ultimate middle class hippy band, you know what I mean?”

Class considerations permeate much of Wilkinson’s work and thinking, including his thinking about today’s China.

“I read a review of Al Gore’s new book that said there’s been massive popularity in China of people reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s “L’ancien Regime et le Revolution”, about the French Revolution in 1776. He basically said that revolutions don’t happen when things are really desperate. They happen when things are improving, but they’re improving more rapidly for a small minority than they are for everyone else. And the reviewer was saying that in China there’s a concern on behalf of the state that they’ve inadvertently created revolutionary conditions with the reforms they’ve made.”

Quality of life in China is certainly improving very unevenly, though at least it’s improving. “It’s funny coming here because it’s such a boom town. I’ve lived in Liverpool and Glasgow, that’s all the places I’ve lived, and the sense of decay is kind of profound when you come to a place like this. I wasn’t in London in the ’80s, maybe it felt like a tiny version of this. Lots of building, and lots of people coming into the city. It’s like seeing what Liverpool and Glasgow would’ve been like 200 years ago.”