Yue Minjun

A preeminent figure in contemporary Chinese art, Yue Minjun has earned critical acclaim and commercial success for his distinctive works, which are densely populated with images of Yue himself in states of euphoric laughter. Pink skinned and wearing toothy, insincere smiles, the doppelgagners engage in a wide variety of everyday and surreal activities, in all matter of media: oil paintings, watercolors, prints, and sculptures. They giggle together in boats, form human pyramids, swim, and, even more peculiarly, hitch air-born rides on the backs of cranes. In other instances, the roaring men recreate, reference, and parody canonic works of Western art or famous pop culture moments. For instance, one laughing Yue vividly mimics Marilyn Monroe in a flowing white dress, while a handful of these characters, wearing plain white t-shirts and black pants, restage Eugène Delacroix’s 19th-century masterpiece The Massacre of Chois. 

Behind the painted smiles is something profoundly disturbing. Although Yue has rejected the title, he is widely considered to be a leader of Cynical Realism, a contemporary movement that grew out of Beijing’s burgeoning art community after the Cultural Revolution. During the 1990s, Yue and his contemporaries challenged the status quo and sought to comment on socio-political issues, Chinese history, and the country’s rapid industrial growth and modernization by using humorous and ironic mechanisms in their art. Theorist Li Xianting has explained Yue’s work as “a self-ironic response to the spiritual vacuum and folly of modern-day China.”

In 2007, Yue’s 1995 painting Execution, which was inspired by the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, set an auction record for the most expensive work to sell by a contemporary Chinese artist. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Queens Museum of Art in New York, Asia Society in New York, and Paris’s Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain. Yue’s work has been included in group shows at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea in Gwacheon, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, the Shanghai Biennale, the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, the Modern Art Ludwig Foundation in Vienna, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, among other institutions.