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Lot Essay
In late 1990, a new community of avant-garde artists began to form in the outskirts of Beijing, in the area surrounding Yuan Ming Yuan, the old Imperial Summer Palace. That new community exemplified the hopes of a new generation of artists as they left academic life behind and grew into their new identities as professional artists. Arriving in 1990, shortly after graduating from university, Yue Minjun was one of the artists whose formative creative experiences were spent in this community.
Beginning in the 1980s, Chinese society was moving toward a market-orientated economy in an atmosphere of opening and reform. These factors helped spark a corresponding new emphasis on freedom and liberation of thought in the cultural sphere. At the same time, as the darker side of modernization became more apparent, mainland Chinese artists became increasingly engaged with the massive social changes taking place around them, often dwelling on the psychological effects on personal experiences and intimate relationships. Famous for his paintings of his own grinning "self-image", often multiplied in absurdist scenarios, Yue was one of the first artists to adopt a critical and ironic view of contemporary life, one that is expressed in the nihilistic hilarity of his paintings. In an artist's statement at the time he wrote, "I paint people laughing, whether it is a big laugh, a restrained laugh, a crazy-laugh, a near-death laugh or simply laughter about our society: laughter can be about anything. 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. The 90's is the time when everyone should laugh" (Yue Minjun cited in M. Schoeni, Faces Behind the Bamboo Curtain, Hong Kong, 1994, p. 111). The depersonalized faces that gaze from Yue's paintings depict the image of the new, contemporary China and set the tone and orientation for much of contemporary Chinese art by both reflecting and criticizing basic aspects of China's urgent push toward modernization. His earliest works feature himself or his friends in playful yet claustrophobic settings, engaged in histrionic laughter. Like Paul Cadmus or Weimar era German painters, Yue is critical of the decadence that surrounds him. But unlike more explicit forms of political satire, Yue's works inhabit an ambiguous zone of cultural critique. His pop colors and absurdist scenarios are as immediately disarming as they are disconcerting, capturing both the excitement and the anxiety brought by new social freedoms.
Sunshine, from 1993, is one of the few large-scale works Yue produced in his early years in the Yuan Ming Yuan artists' village, a valuable representative work that reflects the artist's compositional approach and sense of colour as well as his personal emotional outlook. Sunshine shows Yue deliberately adopting a compositional mode characteristic of western classicism. Like American artist Edward Hopper, he uses architectural elements not only to construct a three dimensional space but a psychological reality. At the same time, Yue overturns the stereotyped subject/ground relationship, subtly reframing viewers' perceptions of figures and background spaces and even colour combinations, and thereby blurring the distinct individual features of his subjects.
For the main subject of Sunshine, Yue borrows the contours of his younger brother's face, who had spent a short period of time in prison, which he simplifies, multiplies, and exaggerates. The architectural elements evoke the tight quarters of traditional Beijing courtyard residences, but the bars on the windows, the drab dress of the figures, and their near-shaved heads equally invoke a prison-like environment. Despite the title of the work, no sky or sunlight is visible, but is only implied by the harsh shadows cast by the buildings and the sharp facial features of the figures. As a result, the figures' laughter appears like a kind of madness befitting those surviving in a profoundly inhuman environment.
For many artists working in Yuan Ming Yuan in the 1990s, portraiture and self-portraiture - and even the use of one's own body in performance art - were powerful and liberating motifs through which to express one's own psychological and social reality. Yue Minjun's works in particular can also be seen in the larger context of different identity-orientated Western art movements of the latter 20th Century. Artists like conceptual photographers Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura, or painters like Marlene Dumas and Robert Colescott, all discovered in conceptual portraits and self-portraits a powerful means through which to launch broad critiques against various representational systems and social structures. Yue Minjun's creativity has at its core a broad narrative ideal: Yue questions the realities of life with a satirical tone and underscores its essence through absurd gestures. Through the repeated renderings of subjects, Yue makes a mockery of political forms, prevailing social mechanisms, and habitual modes of thought. In Yue's works, freedom lives side by side with the absurd, but in them the absurd gives voice to the demand for freedom and liberation that resides deep in the human soul.
Beginning in the 1980s, Chinese society was moving toward a market-orientated economy in an atmosphere of opening and reform. These factors helped spark a corresponding new emphasis on freedom and liberation of thought in the cultural sphere. At the same time, as the darker side of modernization became more apparent, mainland Chinese artists became increasingly engaged with the massive social changes taking place around them, often dwelling on the psychological effects on personal experiences and intimate relationships. Famous for his paintings of his own grinning "self-image", often multiplied in absurdist scenarios, Yue was one of the first artists to adopt a critical and ironic view of contemporary life, one that is expressed in the nihilistic hilarity of his paintings. In an artist's statement at the time he wrote, "I paint people laughing, whether it is a big laugh, a restrained laugh, a crazy-laugh, a near-death laugh or simply laughter about our society: laughter can be about anything. 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. The 90's is the time when everyone should laugh" (Yue Minjun cited in M. Schoeni, Faces Behind the Bamboo Curtain, Hong Kong, 1994, p. 111). The depersonalized faces that gaze from Yue's paintings depict the image of the new, contemporary China and set the tone and orientation for much of contemporary Chinese art by both reflecting and criticizing basic aspects of China's urgent push toward modernization. His earliest works feature himself or his friends in playful yet claustrophobic settings, engaged in histrionic laughter. Like Paul Cadmus or Weimar era German painters, Yue is critical of the decadence that surrounds him. But unlike more explicit forms of political satire, Yue's works inhabit an ambiguous zone of cultural critique. His pop colors and absurdist scenarios are as immediately disarming as they are disconcerting, capturing both the excitement and the anxiety brought by new social freedoms.
Sunshine, from 1993, is one of the few large-scale works Yue produced in his early years in the Yuan Ming Yuan artists' village, a valuable representative work that reflects the artist's compositional approach and sense of colour as well as his personal emotional outlook. Sunshine shows Yue deliberately adopting a compositional mode characteristic of western classicism. Like American artist Edward Hopper, he uses architectural elements not only to construct a three dimensional space but a psychological reality. At the same time, Yue overturns the stereotyped subject/ground relationship, subtly reframing viewers' perceptions of figures and background spaces and even colour combinations, and thereby blurring the distinct individual features of his subjects.
For the main subject of Sunshine, Yue borrows the contours of his younger brother's face, who had spent a short period of time in prison, which he simplifies, multiplies, and exaggerates. The architectural elements evoke the tight quarters of traditional Beijing courtyard residences, but the bars on the windows, the drab dress of the figures, and their near-shaved heads equally invoke a prison-like environment. Despite the title of the work, no sky or sunlight is visible, but is only implied by the harsh shadows cast by the buildings and the sharp facial features of the figures. As a result, the figures' laughter appears like a kind of madness befitting those surviving in a profoundly inhuman environment.
For many artists working in Yuan Ming Yuan in the 1990s, portraiture and self-portraiture - and even the use of one's own body in performance art - were powerful and liberating motifs through which to express one's own psychological and social reality. Yue Minjun's works in particular can also be seen in the larger context of different identity-orientated Western art movements of the latter 20th Century. Artists like conceptual photographers Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura, or painters like Marlene Dumas and Robert Colescott, all discovered in conceptual portraits and self-portraits a powerful means through which to launch broad critiques against various representational systems and social structures. Yue Minjun's creativity has at its core a broad narrative ideal: Yue questions the realities of life with a satirical tone and underscores its essence through absurd gestures. Through the repeated renderings of subjects, Yue makes a mockery of political forms, prevailing social mechanisms, and habitual modes of thought. In Yue's works, freedom lives side by side with the absurd, but in them the absurd gives voice to the demand for freedom and liberation that resides deep in the human soul.