Zhang Haiying’s Anti-Vice Campaign series takes as its subject the Chinese government’s recent initiatives in eradicating prostitution and pornography. Executed on monumental scale and in faux social realist style Zhang’s paintings use the devices of propaganda for non-politicised means: his works neither advocate nor criticise illicit activity, but draw from the associated issues of power, exclusion, vulnerability, and perception to create images of emotive discord.

Finding his source material on the internet, Zhang translates photographic images with subtle painterly manipulations to enhance mass media aesthetics and its conflicting messaging. His tones – dramatic reds over cold greys – allude to both authoritative iconography and strip club sleaze, while his stylised figures are made to look strangely hyper-real, like computer generated avatars, or celebrities overexposed in paparazzi swarms; women objectified by their equally desirable and degrading portrayal.

Zhang renders these scenes with a master’s craftsmanship. Hair, flesh, fabric, objects are constructed as self-contained elements, their individual treatment creating a sense of isolation and disunity in the collage effect. His super-pop sheen is exaggerated through painterly veracity: camera blurs, print bleeds, and flash bulb glares are faithfully replicated by brushwork which borders on abstraction. In Series 005 the night vision video effect is perfectly replicated by impassioned smears and smudges, simulating photo realism with intuitive spontaneity.