(Bad) faith in painting(?): Critically re-evaluating the significance of Yu Youhan’s political pop series

This article seeks to critically re-evaluate a series of so-called ‘Political Pop’ paintings by the Shanghai-based painter Yu Youhan in relation to existentialist conceptions of good and bad faith as well as recent ethically related reassertions of oppositional criticality within the international art world. It will be argued that any description of Yu’s Political Pop paintings as having been produced definitively in either good or bad faith overlooks a persistent and indeterminate enmeshing of cultural production with locally dominant discourses and practices within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as well those prevailing internationally that plays deconstructively across the boundary between conscious acceptance and rejection of freedom of choice and, by extension, the supposed limits of oppositional criticality.