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拍品专文
Struck by the events post Tiananmen Square in 1989, Yue Minjun realised the gap between reality and the ideal and began to create his own artistic definition that would reach a balance between his own psychological struggles and the social conditions in China. He is known for his portraits of intense bright colored smiling faces that seem hilarious and infectious, yet cynical and mocking at the same time. To Yue Minjun, laughing does not necessarily mean happiness, but an illusion of happiness in a world that is inevitably heading towards extinction. Yue Minjun, like Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, Yang Shaobin, and others, created in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a genre of art characterized by a "blithe and cynical" attitude which, through an ironic approach, captures the development of men and their society in contemporary life. Critics named such style "Cynical Realism."
"Cynical Realism," as the name suggests, is both cynical and realistic. A cynical living attitude might seem to be frivolous in nature, one that is casual, indifferent or even senseless, but it is in essence a highly sardonic and insightful mode of commentary on society's ills and injustices; realism, in another respect, refers to the artist's own understanding of "reality." Cynical Realism, then, is a satiric form of expression that prompts the audience to reflect on a "more real" state of "reality" without the illusions of any inherited conventions or ideologies.
Yue Minjun started painting portraits in the early 1990s, obviously with the intent to communicate what he observed and felt within his own living circle, often relying on the appearance of laughing, seemingly carefree faces that would become his iconic image, modeled on his friends and himself. In 1994 he recounted: "I want to find a new reality, an absolute reality that belongs to me and me alone." In his "absolute reality," no artistic forms in this regard is more convincingly revealing than self-portraits.
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 oils titled 99 Idol series, painted in 1996 for the seminal 10th Anniversary Exhibition of Schoeni Art Gallery of Hong Kong, neatly illustrates Yue's core concepts. On 99 canvases, each 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, 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. That same year, Yue also began his Idol series, a set of 20 oils exhibited in the historic 8+8-1, Selected Paintings by 15 Contemporary Artists, hosted in 1997 by the Schoeni Art Gallery of Hong Kong. Larger in size (40 x 40 centimeters each), the Idol series works not only offer the faces but also the contorted bodily figures of men- an attempt to do away with self-portrayal as a means to locate the artist's and viewer's relationship to a conventional "portrait". 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 artist 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.
In 1999 Yue brought this concept to its logical conceptual pinnacle with a set of 15 oils under the name Fifteen Poses in Life - Yellow (Fig. 1). This work foreshadows his Fifteen Poses in Life: Pink (Lot 42), a related set of 15 oils on canvas, each 80 x 80 centimeters. When combined, they form a colossal and visually stunning installation measuring nearly two and a half meters in height and four meters wide. This format extends and empowers Yue' s practice, allowing for latitudes of variation, kindling a more powerful and far-reaching level of artistic and conceptual expression. Standing independently as 15 works of art, moreover, the work seems to be inviting its audience to participate in an "imitation" game, one that enables us to experience the "ostentatious" deportment of the grinning men.
Fifteen Poses in Life: Pink is painted in one intact piece within a square canvas. A slight but trenchant alteration, as such, becomes a cogent "language" for Yue, expressing the notion of "imprisonment". The subjects are caged in 15 identical frames as if incarcerated by the four walls of a prison cell. These squares, from another vantage point, seem like a spotlighted stage on which the bodies of the actors are brought into the spectator's view, with their dark shadows cast behind them. Be it a stage, a prison, a public space or a private shelter, the audience becomes a kind of voyeur, peeping through each "square" to study and observe how the men inside register, through their elaborate contortions and maniacal grins, some aspect of their inner psyche.
Toned in vibrant yellow and pink, both Fifteen Poses in Life: Yellow and Fifteen Poses in Life: Pink are dramatically, if not hyperbolically, colored. In the former a dark-gray background highlights the unnaturally yellowish skin of the men. In the latter the pinkish skin Yue stresses the work's theatricality and ornateness. While such color enhances the theme of "pretense" attached to "ornateness", it is perhaps most symbolic of the flesh and blood that any "real" human body and evokes, above all, our imagination of a human body in a state of wild exuberance and oppression, his blood vessels dilated and thus his skin anxiously flushed. As such, Fifteen Poses in Life: Pink serves as a kind of summary of Yue's set-paintings and their way of representation. Since 1996, with the creations of the Idol series and Pink series, the artist firmly established his distinct style - the use of facial expressions and contorted human bodies as a lucid and forceful artistic language. Yue alludes to the ways in which human communication is fundamentally visual and experienced through ocular expressions; in some anthropological assessments, 93 of our communication is achieved through non-verbal means with only 7 left for verbal communication. Just as we have no way to decipher Yue's body-characters, language itself is a kind of imprisonment; that said, the twisted physique, the preposterous laugh and the clenched eyes of the men seem a more compelling, though voiceless, expression, just as the extravagant physical movement portrayed in Classicism (Fig. 2 & 3).
According equal footing to the language of the body and written language, Yue has unequivocally given the human form a symbolic nature. The artist has said, "Chinese characters are pictographs, and each of them resembles a human action. I try to demonstrate the spirit of Chinese character and their cultural position, to make them, that is to say, more humane. In the past Chinese calligraphy stresses the spiritual interaction between the writer, the viewer and the characters; I found, likewise, that the human body has a kind of relationship with characters. In this way, portraiture assumes a more profound cultural connotation, as it expresses not only a human action but also an action that embeds the signification of a cultural symbol".
"I think laughter is less detestable. My figures are chortling, guffawing, sneering, laughing convulsively and, perhaps, grinning at death or society. They seem to be doing all these at one and the same time and you can't label their laughter discretely. When one laughs one rejects thinking - that is, when one finds something unfathomable, or too difficult to look over, one wants to get rid of it." - Yue Minjun, 1994
A thousand lies make the truth. The repetition Yue maneuvered is based on the same line of thought: the 15 self-portraits, each with a different pose, elucidate the gravitational pull of social norms, which transform "wrong" into "right" and "pretense" into "reality". Yue has said, "an artist is one who entices incessantly the naive and the dragooned. He lives a faulty life from start to end," illustrating his understanding of "reality", which is precisely the "faulty" life he is leading. Men, as the artist recognized, are given no choice but to live a "faulty" life, a life that warps the value of living. Yue Minjun, with the use of a sarcastic and deceptively familiar expression, has pinned down the crux of a twisted humanity and a way of living that demands hypocrisy. It is with such profound conceptual insight, portrayed in a distinct visual style that has gained him the recognition of critics and the public alike, instating the epochal significance of "Cynical Realism" in the history of Chinese contemporary art.
"Cynical Realism," as the name suggests, is both cynical and realistic. A cynical living attitude might seem to be frivolous in nature, one that is casual, indifferent or even senseless, but it is in essence a highly sardonic and insightful mode of commentary on society's ills and injustices; realism, in another respect, refers to the artist's own understanding of "reality." Cynical Realism, then, is a satiric form of expression that prompts the audience to reflect on a "more real" state of "reality" without the illusions of any inherited conventions or ideologies.
Yue Minjun started painting portraits in the early 1990s, obviously with the intent to communicate what he observed and felt within his own living circle, often relying on the appearance of laughing, seemingly carefree faces that would become his iconic image, modeled on his friends and himself. In 1994 he recounted: "I want to find a new reality, an absolute reality that belongs to me and me alone." In his "absolute reality," no artistic forms in this regard is more convincingly revealing than self-portraits.
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 oils titled 99 Idol series, painted in 1996 for the seminal 10th Anniversary Exhibition of Schoeni Art Gallery of Hong Kong, neatly illustrates Yue's core concepts. On 99 canvases, each 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, 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. That same year, Yue also began his Idol series, a set of 20 oils exhibited in the historic 8+8-1, Selected Paintings by 15 Contemporary Artists, hosted in 1997 by the Schoeni Art Gallery of Hong Kong. Larger in size (40 x 40 centimeters each), the Idol series works not only offer the faces but also the contorted bodily figures of men- an attempt to do away with self-portrayal as a means to locate the artist's and viewer's relationship to a conventional "portrait". 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 artist 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.
In 1999 Yue brought this concept to its logical conceptual pinnacle with a set of 15 oils under the name Fifteen Poses in Life - Yellow (Fig. 1). This work foreshadows his Fifteen Poses in Life: Pink (Lot 42), a related set of 15 oils on canvas, each 80 x 80 centimeters. When combined, they form a colossal and visually stunning installation measuring nearly two and a half meters in height and four meters wide. This format extends and empowers Yue' s practice, allowing for latitudes of variation, kindling a more powerful and far-reaching level of artistic and conceptual expression. Standing independently as 15 works of art, moreover, the work seems to be inviting its audience to participate in an "imitation" game, one that enables us to experience the "ostentatious" deportment of the grinning men.
Fifteen Poses in Life: Pink is painted in one intact piece within a square canvas. A slight but trenchant alteration, as such, becomes a cogent "language" for Yue, expressing the notion of "imprisonment". The subjects are caged in 15 identical frames as if incarcerated by the four walls of a prison cell. These squares, from another vantage point, seem like a spotlighted stage on which the bodies of the actors are brought into the spectator's view, with their dark shadows cast behind them. Be it a stage, a prison, a public space or a private shelter, the audience becomes a kind of voyeur, peeping through each "square" to study and observe how the men inside register, through their elaborate contortions and maniacal grins, some aspect of their inner psyche.
Toned in vibrant yellow and pink, both Fifteen Poses in Life: Yellow and Fifteen Poses in Life: Pink are dramatically, if not hyperbolically, colored. In the former a dark-gray background highlights the unnaturally yellowish skin of the men. In the latter the pinkish skin Yue stresses the work's theatricality and ornateness. While such color enhances the theme of "pretense" attached to "ornateness", it is perhaps most symbolic of the flesh and blood that any "real" human body and evokes, above all, our imagination of a human body in a state of wild exuberance and oppression, his blood vessels dilated and thus his skin anxiously flushed. As such, Fifteen Poses in Life: Pink serves as a kind of summary of Yue's set-paintings and their way of representation. Since 1996, with the creations of the Idol series and Pink series, the artist firmly established his distinct style - the use of facial expressions and contorted human bodies as a lucid and forceful artistic language. Yue alludes to the ways in which human communication is fundamentally visual and experienced through ocular expressions; in some anthropological assessments, 93 of our communication is achieved through non-verbal means with only 7 left for verbal communication. Just as we have no way to decipher Yue's body-characters, language itself is a kind of imprisonment; that said, the twisted physique, the preposterous laugh and the clenched eyes of the men seem a more compelling, though voiceless, expression, just as the extravagant physical movement portrayed in Classicism (Fig. 2 & 3).
According equal footing to the language of the body and written language, Yue has unequivocally given the human form a symbolic nature. The artist has said, "Chinese characters are pictographs, and each of them resembles a human action. I try to demonstrate the spirit of Chinese character and their cultural position, to make them, that is to say, more humane. In the past Chinese calligraphy stresses the spiritual interaction between the writer, the viewer and the characters; I found, likewise, that the human body has a kind of relationship with characters. In this way, portraiture assumes a more profound cultural connotation, as it expresses not only a human action but also an action that embeds the signification of a cultural symbol".
"I think laughter is less detestable. My figures are chortling, guffawing, sneering, laughing convulsively and, perhaps, grinning at death or society. They seem to be doing all these at one and the same time and you can't label their laughter discretely. When one laughs one rejects thinking - that is, when one finds something unfathomable, or too difficult to look over, one wants to get rid of it." - Yue Minjun, 1994
A thousand lies make the truth. The repetition Yue maneuvered is based on the same line of thought: the 15 self-portraits, each with a different pose, elucidate the gravitational pull of social norms, which transform "wrong" into "right" and "pretense" into "reality". Yue has said, "an artist is one who entices incessantly the naive and the dragooned. He lives a faulty life from start to end," illustrating his understanding of "reality", which is precisely the "faulty" life he is leading. Men, as the artist recognized, are given no choice but to live a "faulty" life, a life that warps the value of living. Yue Minjun, with the use of a sarcastic and deceptively familiar expression, has pinned down the crux of a twisted humanity and a way of living that demands hypocrisy. It is with such profound conceptual insight, portrayed in a distinct visual style that has gained him the recognition of critics and the public alike, instating the epochal significance of "Cynical Realism" in the history of Chinese contemporary art.