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PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT WEST COAST COLLECTION Yue Minjun Free at Leisure No. 11 2004 oil on canvas 220 x 300.7 cm (86 5/8 x 118 3/8 in.) Signed and dated 'yue minjun 2004' lower left. Signed and dated in Chinese on the reverse.
Provenance Arario Gallery, Beijing Exhibited Shenzhen, He Xiangning Art Museum, Reproduction Icons: Yue Minjun Works: 2004-2006, 3 June-11 June 2006 Cheonan, Arario Gallery, Absolute Images: Chinese Contemporary Art, 28 June-20 August 2006 Literature Reproduction Icons: Yue Minjun Works, 2004-2006, exh. cat., He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen, 2006, pp. 116-117 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay The fixed grin of Yue Minjun is an icon of contemporary China. Instantly recognizable, its uncanny and relentless repetition throughout his oeuvre defies easy analysis. Our initial impression is one of humour or levity, but the smile, seen in endless series, becomes a mask rather than revealing true emotion; the expressive loses all expression, and we are faced with a compelling, hysterical blankness. Yue was raised in socialist China, working on oil platforms; he later moved to the Songzhuang artists’ colony in the eastern suburbs of Beijing. ‘There was no place for individual ambition within the socialist machine. For this reason, most people could not conceive of stepping outside the confines of the State structure; less still to move to Yuanmingyuan with the aim of becoming an independent artist. Yet for some reason this is exactly what I felt compelled to do.’ (Yue Minjun in Reproduction Icons: Yue Minjun Works, 2004-2006, exh. cat., Shenzhen: He Xiangning Art Museum, 2006, p.18). He first came to prominence in the late 1980s, among a new wave of artists who had seen the end of the Cultural Revolution and emerged vividly from the monolith of Social Realism. In 1992 critic Li Xianting coined the term ‘Cynical Realism’ to describe this movement, characterised by irony and disenchantment in the face of China’s dizzying social and economic change. Yue himself rejects the label: ‘I’m actually trying to make sense of the world …There’s nothing cynical or absurd in what I do.’ (Richard Bernstein ‘An Artist’s Famous Smile: What Lies Behind It?’, New York Times, 13 November 2007). The artist explains that ‘In China there’s a long history of the smile. There is the Maitreya Buddha who can tell the future and whose facial expression is a laugh. Normally there’s an inscription saying that you should be optimistic and laugh in the face of reality. There were also paintings during the Cultural Revolution period, those Soviet-style posters showing happy people laughing. But what’s interesting is that normally what you see in those posters is the opposite of reality.’ (Yue Minjin in Richard Bernstein ‘An Artist’s Famous Smile: What Lies Behind It?’, New York Times, 13 November 2007). There is a sense, then, in which the smile is a coping strategy, a cheerfully aphoristic response to the challenges of existence; but as Yue’s comment on ‘Soviet-style posters’ implies, it can also become an act of denial and concealment in enforced uniformity: this was the reality of living in totalitarian China. Under Mao, art existed only in the service of politics. It was employed to promote ideas, shape public opinion and give moral instruction. Mao’s image was the only one that was always safe to paint. The workers’ faces we see in Socialist Realist paintings are in fact hardly ‘realistic,’ but have an oddly cartoonish quality: improbably white teeth, faces gleaming with utopian health and vigour. Yue has taken this stylistic standard and fashioned from it the lunatic idol of his art. He began by painting his friends, before turning the parodic smile upon himself. Over the years, his faces have become pinker, shinier, more hairless. ‘It’s true, what I paint is not very beautiful, but the beautiful things made by other people nauseate me even more.’ (Yue Minjun in conversation with Shen Zhong, Yue Minjun L’Ombre du Fou Rire, exh. cat., Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2013, p.57). A sense of profound artificiality pervades: this is no depiction of real human subjects, but a serial rictus born of propaganda and advertising. Yue’s iterated selves ar