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Lot Essay
Yue Minjun is one of the leading proponents of China's so-called "Cynical Realist" movement. Artists from this movement were all raised under one of communisms' most extreme manifestations, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), an extended period of chaos in which everyday routines were suspended in favor of furthering the revolutionary cause. From the 1990s onward, artists' critique of this history became increasingly explicit, displaying a marked cynicism towards the gap between the ideologies of the Revolution and its consequences for reality.
Beginning in 1993, Yue Minjun's satirical self-portrait became the dominant motif in his art. This figure, broadly grinning with all 32 (or more) teeth showing, often with his eyes shut to the world and his body in contorted positions or multiplied in absurdist scenarios. Many Chinese artists in the 1990s, in search of an expressive language through which to comment on their social reality, found relative freedom in the use of their own image or, in the case of performance art and performance-based photography, in the use of their own body. For Yue, the multiplication and objectification of his own self-image allowed him to criticize what he perceived as the "society of idols" in which he lived, where the mass media production of particular images and styles of behavior wield disproportionate power over everyday life.
In some of his earliest canvases, Yue's impulses create effects akin to collage, with his figures populating surreal compositions excerpted from well-known historical events or photographs. In this canvas from 1995, Yue's "idols" have developed into a more mature repertoire through which the artist pursues critical historical and art historical themes. Here Yue makes obvious reference to Manet's infamous Déjeuner sur l'herbe, displaying his own knowledge of western art history and the painting that was the cause of so much scandal and derision-- and inspiration-- at the 1863 Salon de Refusés.
The allusion also highlights several significant aspects of Yue's practice as an artist. Manet critiqued the bourgeois trappings of emerging leisure culture in France, and he also anticipated the Impressionists' and early modernists' radical break with European academic painting. Contemporary Chinese artists often engage their own aesthetic traditions and cultural environment in elusive and somewhat oblique ways. Like many Chinese painters, calligraphers and poets, Yue invokes and reinterprets the work of prior masters in order to create an aesthetic dialogue and lineage with an artist, contemporary or ancient, and to further extend his own contemporary concerns. By appropriating Manet's imagery, Yue effectively writes himself into modern art history, particularly the aspect of that history which involved social critique.
At the same time, Yue Minjun is producing his own effective break with the Chinese academic painting espoused under Communism. His large planes of color, flat lighting, and direct engagement with the viewer draw both from the visual lexicon of Pop Art and Western advertising, as well as the propagandistic imagery Yue was inundated with as a youth. The contents of the still life - steamed buns, Dynasty wine, the Asian cucumber - mark this as a distinctly Chinese outing. Like Manet, Yue elevates this scene of everyday life to that of a grand history painting, but the bold pop colors and ambiguous hilarity of the scene point to the "stylized ambivalance" and "grey humor" typical of the Cynical Realists. Yue's works are neither didactic (in the propaganda tradition) nor celebrations of consumerism (as in commercial advertising), and instead point towards Yue's own ambivalence toward the folly and faddishness of human behavior under any system.
Beginning in 1993, Yue Minjun's satirical self-portrait became the dominant motif in his art. This figure, broadly grinning with all 32 (or more) teeth showing, often with his eyes shut to the world and his body in contorted positions or multiplied in absurdist scenarios. Many Chinese artists in the 1990s, in search of an expressive language through which to comment on their social reality, found relative freedom in the use of their own image or, in the case of performance art and performance-based photography, in the use of their own body. For Yue, the multiplication and objectification of his own self-image allowed him to criticize what he perceived as the "society of idols" in which he lived, where the mass media production of particular images and styles of behavior wield disproportionate power over everyday life.
In some of his earliest canvases, Yue's impulses create effects akin to collage, with his figures populating surreal compositions excerpted from well-known historical events or photographs. In this canvas from 1995, Yue's "idols" have developed into a more mature repertoire through which the artist pursues critical historical and art historical themes. Here Yue makes obvious reference to Manet's infamous Déjeuner sur l'herbe, displaying his own knowledge of western art history and the painting that was the cause of so much scandal and derision-- and inspiration-- at the 1863 Salon de Refusés.
The allusion also highlights several significant aspects of Yue's practice as an artist. Manet critiqued the bourgeois trappings of emerging leisure culture in France, and he also anticipated the Impressionists' and early modernists' radical break with European academic painting. Contemporary Chinese artists often engage their own aesthetic traditions and cultural environment in elusive and somewhat oblique ways. Like many Chinese painters, calligraphers and poets, Yue invokes and reinterprets the work of prior masters in order to create an aesthetic dialogue and lineage with an artist, contemporary or ancient, and to further extend his own contemporary concerns. By appropriating Manet's imagery, Yue effectively writes himself into modern art history, particularly the aspect of that history which involved social critique.
At the same time, Yue Minjun is producing his own effective break with the Chinese academic painting espoused under Communism. His large planes of color, flat lighting, and direct engagement with the viewer draw both from the visual lexicon of Pop Art and Western advertising, as well as the propagandistic imagery Yue was inundated with as a youth. The contents of the still life - steamed buns, Dynasty wine, the Asian cucumber - mark this as a distinctly Chinese outing. Like Manet, Yue elevates this scene of everyday life to that of a grand history painting, but the bold pop colors and ambiguous hilarity of the scene point to the "stylized ambivalance" and "grey humor" typical of the Cynical Realists. Yue's works are neither didactic (in the propaganda tradition) nor celebrations of consumerism (as in commercial advertising), and instead point towards Yue's own ambivalence toward the folly and faddishness of human behavior under any system.