 ue Minjun should be smiling. He has moved up into the top ranks of the Chinese contemporary art world and his colorful self-portraits of exaggerated, wide-toothed laughter now sell for over $100,000 a piece.
But on this day, in a large studio here on the outskirts of Beijing, Yue Minjun is coming up with new ideas. experimenting with paint.
In one room, he shows off a sketch of a work he is doing based on Jacques-Louis David's, "The Death of Marat." He is also preparing a series of portraits centered on the hunt for terrorists. He says he wants to try something new.
 "The spirit of this series is concerned with searching, seeking something; people are looking for something," he says."I chose terrorism because right now the whole world is looking for terrorists. And terrorism is a global topic that everyone can identify with."
The departure may simply be a way of injecting something different into his prolific repertoire of self-portraits, even though they remain popular on the international circuit.
But any Yue Minjun work is sure to be colorful, ironic, and deceptive, just like Yue Minjun - the man who seems to always wear a mask of quiet seriousness. And it's that seriousness of purpose - that stubborn single-mindedness - that has brought Yue Minjun out of the shadows in recent years.
He has long been regarded as one of the most influential artists in the Cynical Realist movement that emerged in the early 1990s. But the titans of Chinese contemporary painting remain the big three: Wang Guangyi, Fang Lijun and Zhang Xiaogang. Each man has found his niche, his iconic brand and compelling theme. And each man has become a bankable pop art star in China. But there are other respected painters who are toiling in the shadows, like Liu Wei, Mao Yan, Li Shan and Feng Zhengjie.
And then there is Yue Minjun, the imposter from Daqing, the former oil field electrician turned cynical realist; the frail, bald-plated man of colorful, silly, superficial pictures that are almost beginning to look like a mirror of the boom times now upon us in China.
Li Xianting, the dinstinguished art critic, calls Yue Minjun one of the country's most influential artists, a man who "constructs his artistic language as a self ironic response to the spiritual vacuum and folly of modern day China." The critic Jim Supangkat says: "Yue Minjun and his counters employ plain, boring and absurd scenese from life to ridicule society with a discerning eye."
There are, of course, critics of Yue Minjun. They call him over-rated and say his paintings sell for far too much. They also say, privately, that he has done little to innovate as a painter; that his pictures are simply branded images of smiling faces -- a somewhat simple twist on a difficult period but nothing profound.
For years, he was considered a good painter, but not in the front ranks. Yet suddenly, in recent years, Yue Minjun's works have begun to soar on the international market. And now, in the auction world at least, a Yue Minjun painting is as valuable as almost any other Chinese contemporary art work.
 Earlier this year, for instance, at Christie's spring auction of Asian art works, his "Enchanted Spring" fetched $627,000. And at a Christie's auction last year, his "Gweong Gweong" sold for $641,000 - one of the highest prices ever paid for a work of Chinese contemporary art. Indeed, three of the 10 most expensive Chinese contemporary art works ever sold at auction were his paintings.
Yue Minjun's gaudy palette of superficial idols - conceived in a time he believed to be spiritually empty - have now achieved a wide degree of international fame.
This is what Huang Zhuan, the distinguished art critic,says about Yue Minjun: "He found a new way to express something. He uses humor to explain a turbulent period. And no one had done that before. In this sense, he's more extreme than Fang Lijun, who is showing a completely different kind of expression.
Huang added: "In this sense, his works are like the Beijing writer Wang Shuo’s books -- they explain a certain period in China."
Now, in this inaugural issue of ArtZineChina we would like to take you behind the scenes with one of China's best-known painters, to get to know the man behind the smiling faces.
In a series of interviews over the past year, Yue Minjun has talked to us about his life, his passion for art, his first sale, and the dark moments that led to his decision to create hundreds of ridiculously delirious self-portraits. He also tells us why he decided to paint terrorists - even though they don't seem to be invading China.
I. Beginnings: Oil Country
ue Minjun was born in the oil capital of China, the city of Daqing, in northern Heilongjiang Province. His family had moved to the region from central Henan Province in the 1950s, when his father military group was sent to the border of North Korea in war time.
After oil was discovered in Daqing in 1952, his father, a military official, was assigned to work near the Daqing oil fields until whole family moved to Beijing in 1972. And Daqin is where Yue Minjun spent his early years.
 Most of China's accomplished painters are from the same generation - a generation that fell in love with art during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
During that period, schools in Daqing were closed. And so Yue Minjun often spent his free time copying the posters and banners of the time. He drew pictures of military soldiers, workers and heroes, "I liked to copy comic books and propaganda posters," he says. "That was all we had at the time."
A teacher noticed his skills and encouraged him. And before long he was taking lessons with an old art teacher who had specialized in traditional painting. Later, he found other art teachers. But after the Cultural Revolution came to an end, and he graduated from high school, he didn't head to art school.
Instead, like most young people at the time, he got a job. For the next five years, he worked in Tianjin, mostly as an oil company electrician.
Yet all the while, he says, he toyed with art and the idea of becoming a painter. At one point, he says, he found a job that allowed him to work and paint - working 20 days straight, then going home to paint for 20 days.
Tired of work, in 1985 he enrolled in the oil painting department of Hebei Normal University in Shijiazhuang.
"I felt it was unbearable," he now says of his job as an electrician. "I just wanted to paint."
II. Joining the Avant-Garde
  y 1985, the New Wave art movement was already under way in Beijing. Artists like Gu Wenda, Wang Guangyi and Zhang Peili were creating daring and provocative avant-garde pieces, building a new foundation for modern art in China.
In 1987, Yue Minjun showed his first work, in a small exhibition in Hebei. And then, in February 1989, he heard the National Gallery in Beijing would hold an exhibition of avant-garde art, at what would come to be known as the "No U-Turn" show. All the leading Beijing artists would be there. And so Yue Minjun says he headed south, to the capital.
"I took the train from Hebei to Beijing," he recalls. "But when I arrived, there was no event. The whole exhibition had closed."
The police had closed the show after the artist Xiao Lu fired a pistol in her installation to draw attention to it. Avant-garde art, the government quickly decided, had gone too far.
The exhibition was shut just as students were about to take over Tiananmen Square. In other words, something even bigger was taking place in Beijing. And Yue Minjun was there to see some of it unfold. But sensing something bad was about to happen, he says he left Beijing on June 3, a day before the military troops moved in.
The events, however, would have a profound impact on him and other artists. And today, more than 15 years later, Yue Minjun doesn't hide his feelings about the period.
He says that he grew up in a closed world, patriotic but unaware of what was really happening in China. He was somewhat protected in a military family living near China's biggest oil field.
But what he witnessed in 1989 altered his outlook.
"I grew up in a strong family and I knew how to be patriotic," he said in a recent interview. "But after '89 I felt cheated. You want to trust in something; then it changes. I mean, before '89 I was thinking I belong to something. I can trust a person or the place I work, or the country. But after '89 I felt I could only trust myself."
III.The Origins of Laughter
 ue Minjun says he returned to school and graduated later that year.
And then he set about painting his feelings and emotions. Inspired by the events of the time, he searched for the right style to express himself.
For about two years, he says he searched for a defining style. Then he drew people, more and more people, crowds - and eventually a crowd of people that looked just like him, self-portraits. But instead of anguish or tears, he showed laughter, glee - something unexpected.
The characters in his pieces were represented by large faces, open mouths and closed eyes. Every character in his works appears to be intoxicated in a fit of wild laughter. And the background is bright, colorful and almost sunny.
"I mainly tried to show how I was feeling; how I was lost and hurt," he says. "But then I felt maybe if I express it too directly, it's too simple, too easy."
So he used laughter, ridiculous laughter; people laughing so hard they appear to be almost crying. Is it a trick?
"Yes, of course the smiles are a trick," he says. "I wanted to hide the bad feelings behind a smile. In this way everyone can accept it. This is related to traditional culture and the history of Chinese literature. You can't show what you really want."
He added: "In Chinese tradition you can't say things directly. You have to show something else for the real meaning. I wanted to show a happy smile and show that behind it is something sad, and even dangerous."
 A few years ago, in an interview with the critic, Li Xianting, Yue Minjun said: "I began to work on images of people that simultaneously aroused feelings of strength and self mockery, which fit with my mood then and helped to relieve the unhappiness in my heart. Before I produced these people, I felt my art lacked power. Art should be an expression of one's particular feelings and should be direct and deep. So I drew one person, and then added another and another until there were crowds of them. Then I felt my emotions were fully expressed."
By 1993, the central - and soon to be only figure in the portraits - was Yue Minjun himself, or some caricature of him. His works became self-portraits of a deliriously crazy man, laughing at all manner of things. Yue Minjun had created his own icon of the times: an exaggerated self.
The portraits were reminiscent of Geng Jianyi's "second state" images of a scream, painted in 1987. And they could also be seen as the opposite end of Fang Lijun's evolving images of a man, looking very much like the artist, howling, yawning and seemingly groping for something in the aftermath of 1989.
By the early 1990s, of course, Yue Minjun had moved to the center of things - Beijing, to a small village near the Summer Palace, a place called Yuanmingyuan, where an artist colony had formed.
He says he briefly taught art in Hebei, and occasionally returned home to borrow money from his family. But he always rushed back to Beijing. He yearned to paint.
"After graduation I got a job teaching for North China Petroleum College but I left to move to Yuanmingyuan. My parents urged me to return to work, but I loved drawing and had totally lost interest in teaching. I had nothing to teach. Let me draw all my life, no matter how poor I might end up. I just wanted to do what I liked doing."
Things changed in the early 1990s. In 1992, Yue Minjun says he sold his first painting, to Johnson Chang, the owner of Hanart Gallery in Hong Kong, for $1,500. A week later, an American investment banker showed up in the artists colony. The lights went out, Yue recalls. And so that evening, the banker peered at Yue Minjun's work by candlelight. And asked for a single painting.
Reluctant to part with the piece because he was preparing an exhibition, Yue Minjun says he had hiked the price - to $5,000 - and expected the man to say no. But essentially, the man said, "Sold."
Yue Minjun laughs recalling the episode, and what was clearly, in retrospect, a bargain for the investment banker.
 Since then, Yue Minjun has been prolific.
He has painted countless bright canvases of his laughing self, in every conceivable way, and with every conceivable symbol. His self mocking icon of laughter poses in the nude, laughing; he teams up with dozens of clones of himself - laughing during festivals, laughing in military outfits, praying, sitting in a boat, playing war games, and even apparently being gunned down in a crowd of students.
And perhaps for that reason, Yue Minjun's works were not regularly shown in China, until very recently. Mostly, his portraits and sculptures appeared in Europe and other parts of Asia, like Korea and Indonesia.
By the mid 90s, he had already been grouped with Fang Lijun and Liu Wei as part of a group labeled "Cynical Realist" painters by Li Xianting. These were artists whose work had evolved in reaction to 1989 and had political overtones, a sense of cynicism about what was happening in the country.
In his early works, the characters have hair. But like Yue Minjun, by the mid to late 90s, they are bald or balding.
And they are more and more exaggerated. Their mouths are wide open in big smiles; a long row of teeth is perfectly white, and his lips are bright red - all signs that give one the sense of a superficial advertising print.
 His portraits are funny, even silly. They show a man picking his nose, assuming eccentric poses, with twisted limbs; his characters travel to meet other famous people, and seemingly play practical jokes on the world.
He says his process is simple. After he comes up with an idea, Yue Minjun says he calls his brother over to his studio and they first take a photograph of the artist in a particular pose. And then Yue Minjun sketches from that portrait.
His portraits are funny, even silly. They show a man picking his nose, assuming eccentric poses, with twisted limbs; his characters travel to meet other famous people, and seemingly play practical jokes on the world.
They are portraits of Yue Minjun as every man; as a collective; and they appear to show the nation's collective madness and spiritual dissolution.
But in a strange way, over time, Yue Minjun's works have taken on the characteristics of a brand. And increasingly, to those uneducated in Chinese contemporary art, they appear to be portraits borne of a sizzling hot economy.
Now, if you visit Yue Minjun here in Beijing, or page through a catalogue of Chinese contemporary art, you're likely to see legions of smiling faces, like soldiers, like Terra-cotta warriors, and like the masses that have come to symbolize China's people.
The people, Yue Minjun seems to be saying, were told to march in step. And here they are, all like him, laughing, delirious - and mad.
 And having pushed that theme over much of the past decade, Yue Minjun is now searching out his next act-- or at least experimenting with several acts, simultaneously.
"The Death of Marat," part of a series of works he began in 1996, is a way for him to paint in a different style. The work is part of a series of Yue Minjun copies of some of the West's or China's most famous pieces. But in his versions, the main subject, or individual is absent --missing. In the "Death of Marat," there is no Marat.
He says he wants to express a sense of loss, of meaninglessness in the world. And again, it is a trick, a bit cynical and deceptive. Is he mocking western art? Is he saying the great figures of the west have disappeared? Or have these works lost their relevance? That, it seems, is for the art critics and collectors to decipher.
And in a series of works now being held in the Beijing Commune in the 798 factory area, he has painted something entirely different - whirling planes, Arab men, and crazy mall scenes in a collection called, "The Search for Terrorists."
 There are no laughing faces. Indeed, many people in his terrorism pieces are faces, anonymous. We don't know who they are. And who is a terrorist and who is not is unclear. All we know is everyone is being examined. And the colors are rich and vibrant.
The world is searching for terrorists. But who's a terrorist? Where are they? Are they in our midst? Yue Minjun once again appears to be creating almost comical, cartoonish portraits of a maddening new time, not when the world is looking at China's post '89 spiritual decay, but when the world is on the hunt for something more troubling and elusive -- terrorists.
Is this a new chapter for Yue Minjun? Are the smiling men gone?
Not so quick, he says: "Of course I'll paint those again. I just want to try something else; I like to try several styles at once."
〔photos by Chang Lee〕
|
