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Lot Essay
Yue Minjun started painting portraits in the early 1990s with the intention of communicating the emotional life he observed and felt within his own circle. Early on, he began to employ the appearance of laughing, seemingly carefree faces, modeled on his friends and himself. In 1993, Yue began exclusively using the same laughing face - clearly his own - on his painted figures. In 1994 he recounted: "I want to find a new reality, an absolute reality that belongs to me and me alone." What he called an "absolute reality," was not a portrait of the material world, but a portrait instead of the true nature of his social environment, its inherent inner truths revealed through the hysterical and deranged image of Yue's laughing self-image.
As he advanced his artistic inquiries along these lines, using his repeated self-portrait in a variety of conceptually rich and visually engaging scenarios, his paintings increasingly displayed less easily discernible narrative contexts or settings. The set of canvases titled 99 Idol Series, painted in 1996 for the historic 10th Anniversary Exhibition of Schoeni Art Gallery of Hong Kong, neatly illustrates Yue's core concepts. On 99 canvases, each measuring just 25 x 20 centimeters in size, the artist paints his own face with a jaw-breaking guffaw, his eyes tightly clenched. Most faces fill the canvas to the brim with an almost claustrophobic exuberance, allowing the audience to detect every minute detail of their rich, exultant expressions which, even though they belong to the artist alone, they are of such diversity that they seem more representative of the whole human race. Renouncing the depiction of the human body, 99 Idol series is the artist's first attempt to focus exclusively on facial expressions and the pure aesthetic power of his favored motif. As such, the two canvases featured here have a gravitas and significance that exceeds their small size, reminding us of the tremendous breakthroughs in expression of Yue Minjun and his generation, and the works that have come to define Chinese contemporary art. The portraits of Yue have thus run through a passage of extremity, from that of a narrative oriented discourse to a non-narrative expression. Devoid of storyline, the artists creates a space in which to transfigure human sentiment and gesture into his own artistic symbols, which, as a contorted representation of human figures, describe and reveal the absurdity of what we call reality.
As he advanced his artistic inquiries along these lines, using his repeated self-portrait in a variety of conceptually rich and visually engaging scenarios, his paintings increasingly displayed less easily discernible narrative contexts or settings. The set of canvases titled 99 Idol Series, painted in 1996 for the historic 10th Anniversary Exhibition of Schoeni Art Gallery of Hong Kong, neatly illustrates Yue's core concepts. On 99 canvases, each measuring just 25 x 20 centimeters in size, the artist paints his own face with a jaw-breaking guffaw, his eyes tightly clenched. Most faces fill the canvas to the brim with an almost claustrophobic exuberance, allowing the audience to detect every minute detail of their rich, exultant expressions which, even though they belong to the artist alone, they are of such diversity that they seem more representative of the whole human race. Renouncing the depiction of the human body, 99 Idol series is the artist's first attempt to focus exclusively on facial expressions and the pure aesthetic power of his favored motif. As such, the two canvases featured here have a gravitas and significance that exceeds their small size, reminding us of the tremendous breakthroughs in expression of Yue Minjun and his generation, and the works that have come to define Chinese contemporary art. The portraits of Yue have thus run through a passage of extremity, from that of a narrative oriented discourse to a non-narrative expression. Devoid of storyline, the artists creates a space in which to transfigure human sentiment and gesture into his own artistic symbols, which, as a contorted representation of human figures, describe and reveal the absurdity of what we call reality.