Your first reaction upon meeting Yue Minjun (岳敏君) might be, yes, it is indeed he! The face with the enigmatic, jaw-breaking grin, perhaps the most recognizable image in contemporary Chinese painting, is a self-portrait.
"Yes, it's me," Yue said in a recent interview, and he smiled, though in a gentler, less face-splitting fashion than the man in his paintings - the one who drifts Zelig-like past various familiar backgrounds making a sardonic, or perhaps ironically despairing, comment on the passing scene.
Yue, 45, was in New York last month for the opening of an exhibition of his paintings and sculptures that continues through Jan. 6 at the Queens Museum of Art. The show, Yue Minjun and the Symbolic Smile, is the first American museum exhibition of Yue's work and further evidence of his remarkable rise in the superheated field of Chinese contemporary art.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
A few years ago, Yue was eking out a precarious existence in one of Beijing's artist colonies, trying to figure out a way to weave China's tumultuous experience into his works. Now, largely on the strength of that signature grin, he has achieved stardom internationally.
Most conspicuously, one of his paintings, Execution, a satirical Pop Art-like version of Manet's Execution of Maximilian that was inspired by the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, sold for US$5.9 million last month at an auction at Sotheby's in London. It was a record sum for a contemporary Chinese painting. For Yue, the huge sums suddenly commanded by his works - The Pope, depicting him as a prelate, went for US$4.3 million in June - have involved a readjustment.
"I never thought about this in the past," he said. "What was important to me was the creation part of painting. But it seems that something has changed. Maybe it's the way money is becoming more important in society."
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
He is not always comfortable with how his work is analyzed. The mesmerizing enigma of that reddish face painted over and over again, with the wide laugh and the eyes tightly shut from the hilarious strain, is subject to a multitude of interpretations. One Chinese art critic has identified the artist as a member of what he calls the school of "cynical realism," though Yue doesn't feel that he belongs to a school or movement, and he doesn't think he's cynical.
"I'm actually trying to make sense of the world," he said. "There's nothing cynical or absurd in what I do."
Yue was born in 1962 in the far northern Heilongjiang Province of China and as a child moved to Beijing with his parents. He studied oil painting at the Hebei Normal University and graduated in 1989, when China was rocked by student-led demonstrations and their suppression on Tiananmen Square in June of that year.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
"My mood changed at that time," he said. "I was very down. I realized the gap between reality and the ideal, and I wanted to create my own artistic definition, whereby there could be a meeting with social life and the social environment.
"The first step was to create a style to express my feelings accurately, starting with something that I knew really well - myself." That was the first step toward forging what has become the image that has now made him famous. The second step was to devise the laugh, which, he said, was inspired by a painting he saw by another Chinese artist, Geng Jianyi (耿建翌), in which a smile is deformed to mean the opposite of what it normally means.
"So I developed this painting where you see someone laughing," he said. "At first you think he's happy, but when you look more carefully, there's something else there."
"A smile," Yue said, "doesn't necessarily mean happiness; it could be something else."
The smile has been variously interpreted as a sort of joke at the absurdity of it all, or the illusion of happiness in lives inevitably heading toward extinction.
Karen Smith, a Beijing expert on Chinese art, suggests that Yue's grin is a mask for real feelings of helplessness.
"In China there's a long history of the smile," Yue said. "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," he continued. "But what's interesting is that normally what you see in those posters is the opposite of reality."
Yue said his smile was in a way a parody of those posters. But, since it's a self-portrait, it's also necessarily a parody of himself, he added.
"I'm not laughing at anybody else, because once you laugh at others, you'll run into trouble and can create obstacles," he said. "This is the way to do it if you want to make a parody of the things that are behind the image."
The real reason he paints himself is that it gives him a greater margin for freedom of expression, he explained.
"It's not a denial of reality but a questioning of it," Yue said. "And that laugh - anybody who's gone through Chinese recent experience would understand it."
When nature calls, Masana Izawa has followed the same routine for more than 50 years: heading out to the woods in Japan, dropping his pants and doing as bears do. “We survive by eating other living things. But you can give faeces back to nature so that organisms in the soil can decompose them,” the 74-year-old said. “This means you are giving life back. What could be a more sublime act?” “Fundo-shi” (“poop-soil master”) Izawa is something of a celebrity in Japan, publishing books, delivering lectures and appearing in a documentary. People flock to his “Poopland” and centuries-old wooden “Fundo-an” (“poop-soil house”) in
Jan 13 to Jan 19 Yang Jen-huang (楊仁煌) recalls being slapped by his father when he asked about their Sakizaya heritage, telling him to never mention it otherwise they’ll be killed. “Only then did I start learning about the Karewan Incident,” he tells Mayaw Kilang in “The social culture and ethnic identification of the Sakizaya” (撒奇萊雅族的社會文化與民族認定). “Many of our elders are reluctant to call themselves Sakizaya, and are accustomed to living in Amis (Pangcah) society. Therefore, it’s up to the younger generation to push for official recognition, because there’s still a taboo with the older people.” Although the Sakizaya became Taiwan’s 13th
Earlier this month, a Hong Kong ship, Shunxin-39, was identified as the ship that had cut telecom cables on the seabed north of Keelung. The ship, owned out of Hong Kong and variously described as registered in Cameroon (as Shunxin-39) and Tanzania (as Xinshun-39), was originally People’s Republic of China (PRC)-flagged, but changed registries in 2024, according to Maritime Executive magazine. The Financial Times published tracking data for the ship showing it crossing a number of undersea cables off northern Taiwan over the course of several days. The intent was clear. Shunxin-39, which according to the Taiwan Coast Guard was crewed
For anyone on board the train looking out the window, it must have been a strange sight. The same foreigner stood outside waving at them four different times within ten minutes, three times on the left and once on the right, his face getting redder and sweatier each time. At this unique location, it’s actually possible to beat the train up the mountain on foot, though only with extreme effort. For the average hiker, the Dulishan Trail is still a great place to get some exercise and see the train — at least once — as it makes its way
RSS