Exhibited at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin, The World Stage: China is a series of monumental paintings that continues his investigation into the blurry divide between urban/highbrow and traditional/contemporary representations. These paintings evolved as a result of an invitation to Wiley to start a studio in Beijing. While interested in working in China, Wiley felt it was important for the paintings to embody a specific reference to Chinese culture. In his discovery of historic propaganda posters from China’s Cultural Revolution, Wiley found a correlation between the ways in which African American identity has and continues to be manufactured and manipulated by both the media and society, and how Chinese national identity was distorted during the Maoist era.