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."
Taiwan’s overtaking of South Korea in GDP per capita is not a temporary anomaly, but the result of deeper structural problems in the South Korean economy says Chang Young-chul, the former CEO of Korea Asset Management Corp. Chang says that while it reflects Taiwan’s own gains, it also highlights weakening growth momentum in South Korea. As design and foundry capabilities become more important in the AI era, Seoul risks losing competitiveness if it relies too heavily on memory chips. IMF forecasts showing Taiwan widening its lead over South Korea have fueled debate in Seoul over memory chip dependence, industrial policy and
“China wants to unify with Taiwan at the lowest possible cost, and it currently believes that unification will become easier and less costly as time passes,” wrote Amanda Hsiao (蕭嫣然) and Bonnie Glaser in Foreign Affairs (“Why China Waits”) this month, describing how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is playing the long game in its quest to seize Taiwan. This has been a favorite claim of many writers over the years, easy to argue because it is so trite. Very obviously, if the PRC isn’t attacking Taiwan, it is waiting. But for what? Hsiao and Glaser’s main point is trivial,
May 18 to May 24 Gathered on Yangtou Mountain (羊頭山) on Dec. 5, 1972, Taiwan’s hiking enthusiasts formally declared the formation of the “100 Peaks Club” (百岳俱樂部) and unveiled the final list of mountains. Famed mountaineer Lin Wen-an (林文安) led this effort for the Chinese Alpine Association (中華山岳協會). Working with other experienced climbers, he chose 100 peaks above 10,000 feet (3,048m) that featured triangulation points and varied in difficulty and character. The list sparked an alpine hiking craze, inspiring many to take up mountaineering and competing to “conquer” the summits. A common misconception is that the 100 Peaks represent Taiwan’s 100 tallest
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), alongside their smaller allies the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), are often accused of acting on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Some go so far as to call them “traitors.” It is not hard to see why. They regularly pass legislation to stymie the normal functioning of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) administration, and they have yet to pass this year’s annual budget. They slashed key elements of the government’s proposed NT$1.25 trillion (US$40 billion) special military budget, and in the smaller NT$780 billion package they did pass, it is riddled with provisions that
RSS