Yue Minjun, Hat Series - The Lovers, 2005, Oil on canvas, 170 x 140 cm, Private Collection, New York.

Yue Minjun, Musician, 2003, Oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm, Private Collection, New York.

Queens Museum of Art
New York City Building
Flushing Meadows Corona Park
718-592-9700
Queens
Yue Minjun and the Symbolic Smile
October 14, 2007-January 6, 2008

Yue Minjun began his career as a founding member of the “Cynical Realism” school. This group emerged in the early 1990’s, in the wake of the Tiananmen Square incident and the subsequent crackdown on artistic freedom imposed by the Chinese government. From the founding of the PRC in 1949, through the decade long Cultural Revolution that ended in 1976 with the death of Chairman Mao Zedong, art was solely created to promote Communist Party ideology. All of China’s artistic production was framed by a system of government-imposed directives.

Yue Minjun and the Symbolic Smile includes large-scale bronze and polychrome sculptures, watercolors and the artist’s exuberant yet eerie oil paintings. This exhibition showcases how the artist has successfully transformed his iconic smiling self-portrait into his signature motif. One of the self-styled, Beijing-based artists who emerged in the early 1990s, Yue Minjun has since gained both international recognition and national renown: in auction just this month, one of his paintings garnered the highest price ever for a Chinese contemporary artwork; and the Chinese government recently declared Yoe one of eight Chinese contemporary artists to be honored with their own museum in the Mainland.

In the current art world, Yue Minjun and his renowned contemporaries, including artists Zhang Xiaogang and Fang Lijun, are making artworks that reflect a social consciousness relevant to China’s changing political and economic climate. China’s avant-garde artists, many of whom are based in Beijing’s booming art scene, enjoy a surprising degree of creative liberty in utilizing parody and critique to comment on the state of their country. The attention these artists have received from the West also makes them less vulnerable to censorship by the central government.

Yue Minjun’s laughing faces convey the paradox of present-day China. The jubilant expressions depicted on the hearty faces of cloned figures make us wonder about the reality under the toothsome smile. The backgrounds depicted, from a stoic Tiananmen Square to a teeming nuclear mushroom cloud, also allude to the shifting realities of contemporary China. The seemingly cheerful demeanor of these figures suggests an attempt to cope with the country’s complexities. Yue Minjun’s work begs the question: what is truly joyful?

The key to decoding these enigmatic portrayals may lie in the rich cultural tradition that has influenced this artist from the Mainland. Yoe’s laughing faces recall the “Buddha of the Future,” a welcoming figure located at the entrance of countless Buddhist temples throughout China. While his beaming faces bespeak contemporary concerns, they also implore an optimistic future.

Yue Minjun, Untitled, 2005, Oil on canvas, 100 x 80cm, Private Collection, New York.