Yue Minjun

Executed between 1990 and 1991.

Small area of restoration, approx 7.5cm, positioned 24cm in from the right edge and 74cm down from the top. Further small patch of restoration approximately 21cm in from the right edge just below. Scattered areas of paint loss around the edges. The left edge with a vertical fold line running inside the edge from a previous stretching with one patch of associated paint loss, approximately 3cm. The left edge with four visible staple marks through the canvas and two areas of damage to the canvas, approx 8mm and 5mm. Otherwise generally in good condition.
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It is rare that a single early painting can offer new insight into the development of a major artist to the extent that this untitled work sheds light on the career of Yue Minjun. Yue, who has become internationally renowned and something of a symbol for the entire sphere of contemporary Chinese art on the basis of his eerily smiling faces, is one of the key members of a generation dubbed the "Cynical Realists" by curator Li Xianting. While the name has stuck, many of the works it refers to are highly symbolic, based on repeated motifs and exaggerated palettes—in a word, anything but realist. Not so in this work, where the traces of Yue's later signature style are so clearly visible, cloaked in a thin veil of academicism that would fall away with the passing years.

This unsigned, undated work was painted remarkably early, in 1990 or 1991. Even its physical size betrays the meager conditions of Chinese artists at the opening of this key decade: its height, 190 centimeters, was governed by the size of Yue's studio door in the spartan quarters of the Yuanmingyuan (or Old Summer Palace) artists' village. He had splurged on a two-meter canvas, the artist recalls, only to discover that this could not fit into his workspace.

"It was early, I was looking for a new method, and a way to convey the feeling of that moment," Yue recalls, nearly two decades later. "And it struck me that this style was the only way to convey that feeling." The central figure, a self-portrait, squats in the center of a Tian'anmen Square that seems almost overgrown with greenery. His overwhelming smile seems scripted to viewers now accustomed to Yue Minjun's work, but this was something different, the first time such an ominous grin would appear in the artist's work. "I was after the feeling of clouds," Yue reminisces, and indeed, foggy patches obscure the mighty Tian'anmen rostrum, bathing the figures in an even, hazy light. Four figures seem to circle around the artist's own likeness, in ambiguous homage to Matisse's dancers. Immediately to its right, we see a second figure with a nearly identical face and shirt, but long hair which almost renders it androgynous. Another rather masculine female lies to this figure's left, sporting a makeshift ponytail and a pink skirt of the type then popular in China. Two athletic men, neither of whose faces are visible, occupy the painting's lefthand side, as if practicing Tai-chi in this most sensitive of all locations.

The Yuanmingyuan artists had a longstanding practice of painting each other, for lack of models or other interested interlocutors. Yue Minjun's later interpretation of Dong Xiwen's Founding Ceremony of the People's Republic of China is a good example, in which specific members of that tight-knit community are individually visible atop the Tian'anmen rostrum. But this painting is something different, its figures only vague evocations of Yue's peers, its composition not yet riffing on anything that had come before in Western art history. And yet Yue insists that these figures are modeled on his fellow artists of this now bygone era. The image dates to shortly after Yue's move from Hebei province (where he had been teaching art at a minor technical college) to the new environs of the capital and its avant-garde, and bespeaks an outsider's fascination with a circle into which he has been newly inducted.

Perhaps the most notable iconographic detail of this painting is actually an absence: In this work, Chairman Mao's likeness does not hang atop Tianan'men, as it has for so many decades. Recalling his creative process, Yue noted that at first he decided not to include that central picture of the Chinese state in his own composition, for fear of imparting an overt political statement into the work. But, having finished his painting, "I realized that the work is infinitely more powerful for Mao's absence." The result is a composition centered perspectivally around the archway underneath where the Great Helmsman's face should appear. Gone too are the flagpole and the five-star red banner that flies from it each day, the five bridges which arch over the canal which flows before the rostrum, and the winged marble huabiao which adorn its front. There are no reviewing stands to its left or right, nowhere for leaders to sit and look out on parades below. The gridded paving-stone surface of the square extends directly to the base of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. The pictorial plane vanishes imperceptibly into the imperial palace that lies behind.

But even the status of the Forbidden City is unclear, as through this hole we glimpse the same trees and bushes visible to either side of Tian'anmen. Yue seems to be suggesting that the traditional bases of historical and political authority have come unmoored, and that the iconic architectural form of the People's Republic is nothing but a decorative object. It is a powerful statement, coming from exactly the moment at which China's leaders were setting it on course for the sorts of economic and social transitions that have led to the present situation. The Square is empty save for a few artists, left to amuse themselves on the site of the mass politics that have marked their nation's history up until this crucial, transitional juncture.

For Yue Minjun, this single work would mark a transition to the style that would soon bring him his first inklings of fame and success. It would not be a straight path, as he would return to other stylistic tendencies before settling upon his laughing faces in 1993 and 1994. With the knowledge of Yue's later career in hand, this painting becomes a cipher for the artist's entire situation and disposition at a moment when he, the artists around him, and the country in which he created were on the brink of something momentous but still hazy.