Artist of there day, February 24-25: Yue Minjun, Chinese painter, sculptor

Yue Minjun (岳敏君;  1962) is a contemporary Chinese artist based in Beijing, China. He is best known for oil paintings depicting himself in various settings, frozen in laughter. Yue worked in the oil industry until the events of the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising encouraged him to join an artists’ colony outside of Beijing. He quickly earned recognition for his portraits of friends and fellow artists; in addition, his paintings of his own smiling visage, often cloned on numerous figures, gained critical acclaim and led to international exhibitions of his work.He has also reproduced this signature image in sculpture, watercolor and prints. While Yue is often classified as part of the Chinese "Cynical Realist" movement in art developed in China since 1989, Yue himself rejects this label, while at the same time "doesn't concern himself about what people call him.  Influenced by both western and Chinese art history, Yue’s laughing self-portraits often contain surrealist imagery or references to famous paintings; his Tiananmen Square-inspired Execution, which was highest grossing work of Chinese contemporary art in 2007, is compared to Goya’s masterpiece The Third of May, 1808. Yue also works in sculpture, watercolor, and print.

The acidic tones and commercialised vacuity of his works are used to underscore the insincerity of his figures’ mirth. As both antagonists and anti-heroes, Yue’s hysterical cohorts equally bully the viewer and stand as subjects of ridicule. Using laughter as a denotation of violence and vulnerability, Yue’s paintings balance a zeitgeist of modern day anxiety with an Eastern philosophical ethos, positing the response to the true nature of reality as an endless cynical guffaw.

© 2018. All images are copyrighted © Yue Minjun. The use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission from the artist is obtained.

Mr Yue Minjun