Yue Minjun

Born in 1962, Yue Minjun belongs to a generation old enough to have experienced the Cultural Revolution as well as the defeat of democracy at Tiananmen Square.  Artists of his generation look at the ongoing cultural and economic changes in China with a rather skeptical eye.  Like his slightly older colleague Zhang Xiaogang, Yue’s work turns on the seeming homogeneity of the Chinese people; both artists produce portraits of an almost mask-like anonymity.  But while Zhang’s is an art of melancholic but lyric intensity, Yue tends toward hyperbole – a brighter color language, a louder voice, and a more jaded point of view.  Where Zhang draws from photographs of people unknown to him, Yue reiterates a caricatured self-portrait dominated by the same broad grin, as much a grimace as a smile or laugh.  

Yue’s paintings are works of oil on canvas, and, as such, they resonate with the tradition of Western culture, of which they have become a part.  However, the hyper-repetitive nature of Yue’s imagery feels like a critique of both Chinese and Western values, of homogeneity on the one hand and of consumerism on the other.  Yue’s imagination has brought forth a signature image through which his Chinese protagonists, infinitely multiplied alter egos, speak to contemporary Chinese culture itself, even if only to deride it.  Their laughter seems harsh; indeed it often seems forced.  And the reasons for their apparent joy remain obscure.  The ambiguity of Yue’s countenance may be read as the culmination of a certain sort of despair, in which Yue parodies both homogeneity and commercialism as a conscious rejection of the complex society to which he belongs.  At the same time, Yue’s parodies carry weight in that they function not only as critique, but also as extended meditations on Yue’s self.  

Yue was trained at a distance from the culturally and politically powerful art institutions of Beijing.  He studied in the oil painting department of Hebei Normal University and went on to develop his distinctive, self-reflexive imagery at the margins of Beijing during the years immediately following the tragic events at Tiananmen.  Yue’s enigmatic paintings won him quick fame, despite the fact that they remain mysterious even to loyal followers of his work.  It is hard to say whether the obscurity of his point was meant to challenge the powers that be, or if this obscurity might be a cutting dismissal of contemporary materialist behavior on the whole.

But even if we are unable to articulate with confidence exactly what Yue means, the repetition of his subjects asserts awareness – or perhaps even embodiment – of a postmodern sensibility and vocabulary.  There is no acceptance or advocation of a fixed reality in these paintings, only the confusion of wide-smiling men in alienated settings.  His identical protagonists, like a multi-headed jack-in-the-box popping up with as many uniform grins, look to nothing beyond the moment at hand, advancing no particular meaning or interpretation.  By peopling his canvases with a similar image again and again, Yue risks being viewed as simply repetitive.  But one of the great achievements of his art is the Zelig-like proliferation of his repetitive presence in different contexts, and the paintings themselves stand as strong examples of craft and an assiduous devotion to contemporary feeling.  The artist is not looking for a transcendent image; he is searching for something to equal the spiritual arc of his time.

Yue’s Goldfish (1993, Lot 53) is a fascinating early example of the artist’s practice.  The work depicts a line-up of his laughing men, who queue beside a white, stone balustrade and peer down towards a single goldfish swimming next to a bridge.  The surrogate selves are like tourists appreciatively ogling a scene to which they’ve been directed by a travel guide.  Yue’s manic surrealism makes for an arresting and wonderfully absurd image; like a dream, it seems wholeheartedly folded in upon itself.  Yue plays on the dual absurdity of representing a Chinese everyman and of establishing difference and individual identity in a country as populous as China, now well in excess of a billion.  The tension between individual and mass is the central subject his cloned self images express.

In Descent from the Cross (1997, Lot 52), three laughing heads, two on the left and one on the right, surround an upside-down figure clad only in a skimpy red undergarment, a Speedo-like swimsuit.  From the work’s title, we must assume the central, upside-down figure is Christ.  But, like the three figures surrounding him, this Christ figure laughs uproariously, too!  Yue turns a subject traditionally meant to inspire contemplation and appreciation of humanity, into a carnivalesque display.  This work may resonate most powerfully with Western viewers, but it precisely for this sort of almost anarchistic charge that Yue’s work on the whole seems to strive. 

Untitled (3 parts) (1997, Lot 54) offers a similar upside-down, right-side-up play of the artist’s imagination.  From the familiar (though here bald) portrait in the bottom panel of this three-panel work sprouts a tower of three more interconnected heads; the second and fourth (top) heads are upside down, and at the very top of the pile, a cap rests atop the chin of the uppermost upside-down alter ego.  The work brings to mind familiar video and sculptural works of Bruce Nauman, but the repetition of the ubiquitous head unequivocally identifies the triptych as the artist’s own.  The grisaille coloration of the work is an unusual choice and lends a sort of toned-down refinement that is amusingly at odds with the bizarre subject matter.    

In Westertoren (1998, Lot 55), an idiosyncratic painting made while Yue was living in Amsterdam, we again see the artist’s alter ego.  He appears as happy as can be to have assumed the role of King Kong on a European tower of some sort; naked, his arms and legs wrapped around the building, and fleshed out in uncharacteristically impressionistic brushstrokes (as is the whole picture), the gleeful figure offers its usually toothy grin.  What are the sources of the artist’s originality for this work?  Yue’s intentions aren’t clear.  As is often the case in his work, there is little reference to anything beyond the context the painting creates for itself, the pictorial world of Yue’s fertile imagination. 

Today, Yue Minjun is based in Beijing and well established as one of the most famous practitioners of Cynical Realism.  Continuing to mock the Socialist Realism of an earlier generation while critiquing the societal changes within his own, Yue’s images are deeply subversive in their adhesion to a reality that emphasizes alienation and mistrust.  Few could take solace in such an eccentric presentation of the human figure, but it is precisely through the seemingly infinite reiteration of this form that Yue Minjun has given articulate expression to the experience and ambivalence of his generation.