Yue Minjun

Chinese Contemporary, Beijing

Colours: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is much stronger and more vibrant in the original with warmer colours overall. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The canvas is quite slack and there is very light draw in places along the left edge and towards the bottom left corner. There is minor wear at the four corner tips and in places at the top edge. There is a small depression near the right edge approximately 30cm up from the bottom corner. There is a minute black media accretion approximately 3cm above the male figure's right eyebrow, visible in the catalogue illustration. There are a few minute spots of brown media accretion towards the lower right corner, and a small white mark to cupid's upper thigh. When examined under ultra-violet light, there are two small areas of minute spots that fluoresce in cupid's right leg, these do not appear to be retouching.
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Cupid Kissing Psyche is an elegant and perfectly apposite example of Yue Minjun's practice of hi-jacking Western iconography as a means of articulating Oriental concerns. In this instance, Minjun super-imposes his own maniacally grinning head over that of Psyche, rendering Gérard's original piece (left) both absurd and unsettling. By trivialising a moment of intense erotic passion steeped in the Greek mythology that under-pins European culture, the artist is not attacking the hegemony of Western Art but making a comment on the moritoriuim placed on self-expression in modern China. For Minjun, the only response to the horror of oppression is laughter; self-ironic, insincere, forced laughter. All thirty-two teeth gleam from an impossibly red face that is laughing too hard and smiling too widely for the message to be humorous. This is the tipping point where the ontological crisis of Minjun's China over-balances; the fixed smiles and ruddy health of socialist realism's thrusting, dynamic worker-peasants are on the point of cracking into uncontrolled and irrational hysteria; "laughter is a moment when our mind refuses to reason. When we are puzzled by certain things our mind simply doesn't want to struggle, or perhaps we don't know how to think, therefore we just want to forget it." (Yue Minjun quoted in Monica Dematte, Yue Minjun)

Minjun reached this point himself in 1989 following the massacre at Tiananmen Square in June and the closure of the China Avant Garde show at the National Gallery in Beijing earlier that year. Along with Fang Lijun he formed the Cynical Realists, a movement with a mandate to take on the authorities not through violence or sedition but through simple, uncomplicated apathy: "A fool is someone still trusting after being taken in a hundred times. We'd rather be lost, bored, crisis-ridden misguided punks than be cheated. Don't even consider trying the old methods on us, we'll riddle your dogma with holes then discard it in a rubbish heap." By laughing at an impossible system, and doing so through the language of high Western art, the artist issues an "unimpassioned" crie de coeur that resonates across both cultural and political barriers. As a blow for artistic and social freedom, there are few works that operate with such immediacy and passion as Yue Minjun's Cupid Kissing Psyche.