Chinese cartoon blogger's funny take on Western art captures imaginations
Gu Mengjie's unique style of storytelling mesmerises Chinese audience eager to learn about Western art
A cartoon blogger’s posts on Western artists and their works have found a new audience amongst China’s young and wealthy.
Since then, the hilarious column that calls French artist Edgar Degas an “otaku” – a term that describes people who stay at home all the time – and impressionist master Vincent Van Gogh the founder of the “lunatics” style, has picked up thousands of followers. Among them are some of China’s most influential artists and critics.
“I am crying with laughter,” another reader wrote after reading Gu’s column on Andy Warhol that compared the American pop art icon to pop singer Lady Gaga – a well-known celebrity in China.
The size of Gu’s audience may be tiny compared to the country’s most followed bloggers, but his unique style of storytelling that exploits the hippie vocabulary and jokes of China’s Web 2.0 generation has mesmerised an increasingly curious audience who are eager to learn about Western art.
