Wu's pivotal installation, Red Humour International (1986), laid the foundation for his "highly idiosyncratic and sophisticated approach to painting, which forgoes image in favour of political jingoism, religious scripture, and advertising slogans".
"[7] The Cultural Revolution caught public attention when the first Marxist-Leninist ‘big character’ poster was put up at Peking University in 1966.
When this ‘mass voice’ became fully supported by Mao, a new visual landscape was created, with slogans, directives, criticisms and moral aphorisms flooding all surfaces.
Historian Wu Hung suggests, “all traditional calligraphers conducted this transformation in one way or another, but none of them tried to completely divorce form from content.
With the visual power of the Chinese character, it was inevitable that the avant-garde artists would revisit the potential of the written word in the late 1980s.
As Wu Shanzhuan said, “The Chinese character is the most significant element, in terms of its ability to shape people’s thinking or to influence the national psychology”.
[12] Some of the other graduates of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art, who began to play a leading role in China in the mid-1980s, were Wang Guangyi, Shang Peili, Geng Jianyi, Huang Yongping, and Gu Wenda.
In 1985, students became allowed to create a single work in any freely chosen style, although they had to follow their instructor’s favored subject and technique.
Wu Shanzhuan, and other guannian artists, like Xu Bing, fixated on the revolution in ideas itself to elaborate on their concept of an anti-art project.
Wu Shanzhuan, along with other Chinese artists such as Xu Bing and Gu Wenda, hold ideas where images and words are undertaken into one holistic concept.
All of these artists also embraced the traditional philosophy of Chad Buddhism, “which encourages an ironic sensibility and a refusal to privilege any one doctrine over another in the search for truth”.
[20] Apartment art had moved on to a different approach on materialization, and that of communicated relations between artists and things, in which the subject matter was more valued than the concept/idea.
[22] Cultural Revolution slogans mix freely with advertising pitches, and ancient poems on the walls of the installation Red Humor.
He explained his performance after the authorities shut him down saying, "The National Art Museum is not only a place to display artwork, but it also can be a black market.
For the Chinese New Year, I have brought first-quality shrimp suitable for export from my home village in celebration of the holiday and to enrich people's spiritual and material life in our capital.