What You See Might Not Be Real was created by Chinese sculptor Chen Wenling in 2009 and installed at a Beijing art gallery. The rampaging bull represents Wall Street — and in Chinese slang, "to fart" means to bluff or lie, which tells you exactly what Wenling thought of the financial industry's role in the 2008 global crisis. The figure being pinned to the wall by the force of it? That's Bernie Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme collapsed that same year and landed him a 150-year prison sentence. It's a piece that works on pure visual impact before you even know the story — a massive, muscular bull in mid-charge, its blast of hot air rendered in solid fiberglass, crushing a man against the gallery wall. Then you learn what it means and it hits entirely differently. Chen Wenling was born in 1969 in Fujian Province, China, into a poor family who couldn't afford toys — so he made sculptures from clay instead. He went on to study at the Xiamen Academy of Art and later at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. His work — often rendered in bold, saturated colour with oversized, grotesque figures — draws on Rodin, Dalí, Magritte and Botero while carving out its own unmistakably sharp satirical voice. He won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and has been exhibiting internationally ever since. Political art at its most unapologetically loud.