Yue Minjun

Schoeni Art Gallery, Hong Kong
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1995

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Upon close inspection there are two very small media accretions in the neck of the standing figure and two towards the centre right edge. There is a very small paint loss to the left of the extreme top edge and a very minor rub mark to the right of the bottom edge. The top two corner tips and the centre of the extreme top edge fluoresce under ultraviolet light.
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Painted in 1994, Overwhelm dates from the very turning point of the New Art Movement in China and is an extraordinarily rare early work by Yue Minjun, the leading light of the Cynical Realist school who has come to define contemporary art practice in China. Bought by the present owner from Manfred Schoeni's Hong Kong gallery in the mid 1990s, its appearance at auction is the first time it has been seen in public in over a decade. Depicting a single figure with multiple grinning faces, Overwhelm is a painting full of symbolism, a veritable time-capsule that enshrines the mood of China at a very specific moment in history.

 

The youth stands against an ornate red wall like that of the Imperial Palace, setting the scene in Tiananmen square, Beijing, the historic cultural centre of the capital and also the scene of one the most audaciously authoritarian demonstrations of political might in modern history. The jaunty angle of the low horizon line, which slopes off towards the lower left corner, reminds us of the spontaneous, informal tourist snapshots that were a symptom of the gradual opening up to the West in the early 1990s. The youth's relaxed posturing is thoroughly contemporary and in marked contrast to the staged gestures that can be found in Zhang Xiaogang's portraits based on vintage 1950s photographs. In place of the ubiquitous, utilitarian workers' uniforms worn by the masses, a hang-up from Mao's term in office, here the youth asserts his independence by his relaxed attire, crew-neck sweatshirt and baggy body jacket. Unlike the artist who, at the time, wore his hair in a ponytail as a sign of rebellion, here he sports a standard crew-cut. The hand to the left of the composition holds a red silk scarf which seems to have been removed from his body. This motif is loaded with connotations. Throughout the century red has been the colour adopted by socialism, both in the Soviet bloc and in China under Mao. The red scarf has particular symbolism and was given and worn as a sign of an accolade in China. Here it has been removed, as if the figure is casting off not only Chinese cultural dress and heritage but also divesting himself of Communist ideals of collectivism. Ironically, of course, the new garments which are so immediately evocative of youth culture in China in the early 1990s, become a de-facto uniform in themselves, no more individual than the Maoist dress that they sought to renounce. Based on a limited understanding of Western culture as it trickled in at the beginning of the decade, this attire feels neither wholly Western nor Chinese, a cultural hybrid fashioned in limbo between the clashing cultural models of Capitalism and Communism. Behind him, the beautifully painted expanse of blue sky is perhaps symbolic of the hope for a brighter future after the quashed hopes of the past.

 

At the time, Yue Minjun was living in the recently formed artists' village of Yuanmingyuan in the outskirts of Beijing, where he had lived since 1991 with Fang Lijun and Yang Shaobin among others. Although the Chinese authorities have recently signaled their intention to dedicate a museum to Yue Minjun in recognition of his inestimable contribution to the visual arts, at the time this community of non-conformist artists living on the margins of society were eyed with suspicion by the State. The present work is entirely reflective of the group mentality of the artists' commune and there are strong stylistic and thematic similarities with works produced by Fang Lijun at the same time, images of disenfranchised urban youths, their faces often contorted with gaping yawns of anomie. Here, the gaping yawn of Fang Lijun is transposed into the sardonic, artificial grin that has become Yue Minjun's stock-in-trade. Although tentative smiles appear in works from 1992-93, this is one of the earliest depictions of the fully evolved motif which continues into the artist's work today. The hyperbolic, uncomfortable smile, emphasized by the black cavity of the mouth, is further enhanced by the multiple heads with multiple grins. On the one hand, this individual with several identical heads is a manifestation of the tension in society between newfound ideals of individualism and China's collective past. This unusual composition recalls to Western eyes Titian's Allegory of Prudence, but perhaps more poignantly it recalls certain East Asian depictions of the Buddha with three heads. At the bottom of the picture, a fourth head pops up, held down by the figure's hand as four is an inauspicious number in Chinese culture. The hand to the left, its palm turned upwards towards the grace of the heavens, further corroborates the association with the Buddha. As Yue Minjun says, the motif of the smile is in part based on images of the Buddhist icon, "I decided that my laughing faces would serve as a reminder of a better tomorrow..., just as the Maitreya Buddha in the temples do, and would resonate with those individuals who had learned to laugh because they understood that almost any other response was futile" (The artist cited in 'Yue Minjun By Himself' in Exhibition Catalogue, Shenzen, He Xiangning Art Museum, Reproduction Icons: Yue Minjun Works, 2004-2006, 2006, p. 16).

 

As the title - Overwhelm - suggests, this is a painting that deals with the stultifying impasse caused by the clash of cultures. Having lived through repression, Yue Minjun's specific generation faced the subsequent onslaught of another, altogether antithetical, cultural model. Literally overwhelmed by the inundation of Western influences once the sleuce gates were opened up in the 1980s, the system of values built up over decades of totalitarian Communist rule lost its significance and was usurped by imported - and shallow - Western culture, its clothes, television, music and not least art. This ideological revolution left in its wake a spiritual vacuum, the result of rapid societal change that outpaces the evolution of a nascent native culture. In a complex, layered painting, Yue Minjun questions whether the arrival of a new alternative is any better than the last.