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This thesis examines contemporary Chinese painting after the CulturalRevolution(1966~76), focusing upon so-called “Chinese Pop art”, which I termed as“Socialist Pop art”. I considered the art of this period within the broader context of socialchanges especially after the Tienanmen incident of 1989.After the Cultural Revolution during which idolization of Chairman Mao was at itspeak, one of the major changes in communist China was that an anti-Mao wave wasgenerated in almost every social class. For example, novels that revealed the hardshipsduring the Cultural Revolution were published. Posters that openly criticized the Maoismwere also produced and displayed on the walls, and demand for democracy spurredwidespread activist movements among young generations. These broad social changeswere also reflected in art. A variety of art movements were introduced from the West toChina, and after a period of experimentation with the new imported styles, artists began toapply the new artistic idiom to their works in order to visualize their own social andpolitical realities they lived in. It was a shift from earlier Socialist Realism to a newexpression either directly or indirectly, “Socialist Pop”, an amalgam of Socialist Realism andPop art tradition. After the 1989 crackdown of Tienanmen Square protest, when communistgovernment quelled with brutal measures the students, workers, and ordinary people whorose for democracy, greater urge to protest the Deng Xiaoping regime emerged. This timecoincided with the gradual emergence of art using Pop art vocabulary to satirize the socialreality, the Socialist Pop art, along with many other art forms all with avant-garde spirit.One of the most frequent subjects of Chinese Pop art was visual images of ChairmanMao and his Cultural Revolution, and new China that was saturated with capitalism, whichtainted the Chinese way of life with a Western way of consumerism and commercialism.The reason for the popularity of Mao’s image was spurred by the “Mao Craze”in the early1990’s. People suddenly began to fall in a kind of nostalgia for the past, and once again,Mao Zedong was idolized as an entity who can heal the problems of modern China whohad been marching towards their ultimate destination, the economic development. But this time Chairman Mao was no more an idol but just a popular, commercial product. He is nomore an object of worship of almost religious nature but he has become an iconographysymbolizing the complex nature of present Chinese society. During this process ofdepicting the social reality, Chinese artists are making the authority and sanctity of Maoismineffective. Dealing with this new trend of contemporary Chinese art in view of “Socialist Popart”two manners of re-creating Pop art can be illustrated: one that incorporates thepropaganda posters of the Cultural Revolution; the other borrows from Chinese traditionalpopular imagery or mass media, such as photos taken during Mao era. What is worthmentioning is that these posters and photos of the Cultural Revolution can be identified as‘popular’media, as they were directed to educate the popular mass, thus combination ofthis ingenuous pop media with Western Pop art can be fully justified as a genre unique toChina. Through this genre, we can discover a new chapter of the Chinese contemporarypainting and its society, as their Pop art can be considered as self-portraits true to theirpresent appearances.