Wang Qingsong, Follow Me, 2003, color photograph, 47 x 118”.

Gothic yet humdrum, the oversize staged photographs in Wang Qingsong’s first US solo show may be too melancholic to deliver the assured satire they’re usually credited with. Earlier images here bear traces of Wang’s “Gaudy Art” phase, when he joined that mid-1990s movement to spoof the mix of logomania and folksiness styling China’s nascent consumerism. Later tableaux, however, are more plaintive than declarative in mood. Often portraying despondent pluralities—waylaid migrant workers in Sentry Post, 2002, half-buried nudes in Archaeologist, 2004—they lend a shade of Boschian allegory to social documentary.

The artist deadpans as pedagogue in Follow Me, 2003, before a blackboard constellated with symbols and watchwords, where “Harald Szeemann” and “clearance sale,” Olympic rings and “Venice Biennale” are just a few orienting scribbles. Named after a BBC English-instruction series massively popular on 1980s Chinese TV, and with Joseph Beuys’s chalk diagrams in mind, the picture maps the opportunities as well as the conscriptions of any lingua franca, art-world currencies included. In the dazzling Competition, 2004, hundreds of handmade ads plaster a Beijing movie studio, hawking Huggies, CitiBank, and Art Basel alike. The inky scripts on peeling paper may recall the defamatory “big-character posters” of the Cultural Revolution. But the essentially counterfeit brandscape—littered with crew like factory-art assistants, though entirely drawn by Wang himself—mounts fraught questions about imitation versus innovation, and the status of individual producers amid mass production, in China’s growing economy.

Labor preoccupies Wang’s fablelike video pieces, too, which time-lapse long processes to under five minutes each. In Skyscraper, 2008, a glowing hive of scaffolding shot from afar seems to build itself; only a decelerated epilogue of nighttime lullaby and silent fireworks offers the unseen workers tribute. Converting strenuous effort into preternatural efficiency, these dark mirrors held up to capitalist fantasy make visible the losses ghosting the spoils.

— Chinnie Ding