Yue Minjun

Chinese Contemporary, London

Marie-Jose Mondzain, Transparence, Opacité? Paris, 1999, p. 102, illustrated
Shu Yang et al., ed., Purity: A Dip Interview with 103, Beijing, 2003, p. 443, illustrated

Yue Minjun’s canvases revolve around the artist’s caricatured self-portrait as a laughing, excessively toothed head. Trained outside the academic currents of Beijing in the oil painting department of Hebei Normal University, Yue first took up what would become his trademark motif while living in the Yuanmingyuan artist’s community on the northwestern fringes of Beijing in the wake of the 1989 student movement. His style has been grouped with that of his peer Fang Lijun (Lots 2, 116, 117, and 118) as “cynical realism,” a term coined by the instrumental critic and curator Li Xianting to describe a trend toward ersatz renderings of the human face with latently political implications that circulated in the early 1990s. Yue never looked back; through repetition and circulation, his laughing men have become eerily idolatrous tokens of a society newly committed to the pleasures of consumption. Yue has used his smiley-faced vocabulary to tackle everything from the Western art historical tradition to the ideological climate of millennial China. While his usual palette tends toward exaggerated pink skin tones and kitschy blue skies, monochromatic works have punctuated his output, forming a secondary, chilling thread. The present work dates to 1998 and remains the artist’s largest monochrome to date. Alternatively titled Forbidden City, it presents five crouching “lions” akin to the stone sculptures that have stood watch over China’s imperial, political, and now commercial buildings over the centuries.