ILLUSTRATED:
Reproduction Icons: Yue Minjun Works, 2004-2006, He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen, 2006, color illustrated, p. 71

Yue Minjun, a Chinese artist, once described the seemingly-crazy laughing faces in his paintings in an interview thusly: “Some may think these faces are my self-portrait, and many people think that these faces are absolutely absurd. In fact, those who think that these faces are funny are just part of my ordinary audience; those who are more professional and more cultural will find that what I paint is not laughing faces, but the extreme end of the spectrum of laughter—that is to say, ultimate sorrow.”

“Laughter originates from agony, which is the true nature of life.” Yue mocks the world with his paintings. Yue went to the department of art at Hebei Normal University in 1985 and drew much inspiration when he visited the “China Avant-Garde Exhibition” in Beijing in 1987. In 1991, he moved to the artistic community at Yuanmingyuan and devoted himself to art creation. Beginning in the early 1990s, faces in Yue’s paintings began to almost resemble his own self-portraits. No matter how many faces in his paintings, they exaggeratedly simulate all kinds of situations, historical events, or world-famous masterpieces to shape Yue’s strikingly vivid self-image. Yue enjoys painting a lot and never gets tired with it. Painting to Yue is a stage performance and a self-expansion, in which he forms a “hero” image. Yue then shapes himself into multiple new idols, a collective and ethnic image.

Yue’s exaggerating and sardonic style has always given his audience a humorous, parody-like association. However, through careful observation, the simple and advertising style, mark, or symbol behind the laughing face reflects cruel problems in the contemporary society. Although it seems that the artist is working on an “idol making” project, he achieves his anti-idol goal through repetitive revisions and reinterpretations of these images. The artist thus has successfully developed his own brand of artistic appeal and plays an important role in Chinese contemporary art. Yue Minjun was a representative figure of “Cynical Realism” in the 1990s as well as one member of F4 in the art market.

Calling to mind stylistic cartoon characters, Yue’s human figures in this piece have ruddy skin, perfect teeth, and tightly closed eyes and display a range of odd, comical actions, and expressions. The ironic depiction of these simplified, formularized, and advertising images touches its audience’s hearts easily. Thus, the laughing face motif has become one of the most significant symbols in Chinese contemporary art. These art pieces reflect the artist’s interaction with the world. According to Yue’s words, creating each series is like writing a play in which he uses his thoughts and emotions as inspiration to outline a story.

Yue has stated that the inspiration for the Hats series came from seeing the olive wreaths that medal-winners wore at the Athens Olympics in 2004, which got him thinking about how hats and other head-wear denote personal identity, social status, nationality, and ethnic identity. In the Hats series, on which he began to work in 2004, Yue Minjun undertakes a further exploration of people’s identity and roles within society, revealing his great concern over socioeconomic issues. This auction item, “Hometown”, was created in 2005 as one of the Hats series. The background of “Hometown” is associated with “Memory of Hometown”, a famous painting of Chen Yifei, a late painter, which depicted the scenery of Zhouzhuang, a waterfront town in the southern of the Yangtze River. Purchased by an American entrepreneur and later presented to Deng Xiaoping, the stone arch bridges in Chen’s “Memory of Hometown” have become the mark of waterfront towns in the southern of the Yangtze River and even the template of nostalgic China.

Chen’s death in 2005 may have been the impetus for Yue to create “Hometown”. The stone arch bridge in the background is Zhouzhuang, a waterfront town in southern of the Yangtze River. Zhouzhuang becomes famous because of Chen’s painting while Kunshan City, a town nearby Zhouzhuang, is an industrial complex where numerous international science and technology factories are located. Both the embroidered words, NOKIA, on the hats and odd, comical actions and expressions of the figures in the painting imply China’s helpless situation as the world factory. Words on the hats are mirror images, not erect images. Erect images suggest the mainstream and official thoughts while mirror images are the projection of history and memory. In exercising his parody-like, easy-going style to reflect serious and gloomy global issues, Yue shows his concern for the world through his paintings.

Feng Boyi, an art critic, once commented on the concern of Yue Minjun, “I think that what is most characteristic of Yue Minjun’s creative ideas and his language is the way in which his works manage to demonstrate the spirit of the age. … Yue Minjun combines the basic elements of past propaganda posters with those of modern advertisements: simple, flashy, superficial, and visually direct images and dazzling colours feed the language and style of his art…. Since the end of the 1990s, aesthetic images from Nature, such as landscape, gardens, flowers and birds, beasts, even sky and outer space, have appeared in Yue Minjun’s works. He also uses memories born of his personal experience, as well as an exploration of the shifts in aesthetics that mirror the times. The works track reality through a period of social transformation in China. Viewed from this perspective, Yue Minjun’s works correspond with the nature of a Chinese society desperate to modernize; in other words, his works exhibit the changing reality during a period of social transformation in China.” (“To Be is Just Absurd: The Art of Yue Minjun” by Feng Boyi, Reproduction Icons: Yue Minjun Works, 2004-2006, He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen, 2006, p. 9)