Who is Andy Warhol from Mao II and what is their importance?

Warhol made his name and reputation for, among other things, taking photographs of well-known public figures, celebrities as well as politicians, and reproducing their images with unusual, generally very intense, colors. He and his work were, in other words, intrigued and/or defined by manipulations of image, with the references to both in the narrative manifestations of the novel's metaphoric consideration of image as a tool of maintaining popularity and/or control.