Love it or hate it, Pop Art show is a surefire success

The locale for a Shanghai exhibition on Andy Warhol could not have been chosen better - a renovated steel factory called Red Town. Warhol was the pope of American pop art and worked in a New York studio, "The Factory".

In the tradition of Warhol's studio, there was aluminum foil everywhere and the T-shirts my Chinese acquaintance had designed for the exhibition were also wrapped in foil, like hot dogs. Truly an apt tribute to an artist who had celebrated Hollywood glitz and mass consumption by reproducing American icons such as Coca Cola bottles and Campbell's soup cans.

Within the exhibition, Warhol's multicolored Marilyn Monroes beamed next to Maos. There were also pictures of angels embracing, doing handstands, or being serenaded by a cricket. An angel with a bluebell cap was holding a pussycat in its apron and asking a provocative question. Warhol produced many pink cats called "Sam", bumper crops of shoes and flowers that looked like clones. A far cry from paintings by Qi Baishi or Zhang Daqian, where every stroke appears intensely personal.