Pace Gallery, a leading contemporary art gallery that focuses on 20th and 21st century artists, shares commentary on Yue Minjun’s work that bring insight into my developing topic. Pace describes Yue in a similar fashion to many others – as a founding member of the cyclical realism movement that emerged in China in the mid-1990s, a leader in Chinese contemporary art, and as a progressive artist that has challenged political oppression in the country. Pace quotes Yue, who stated that “he has always found laughter irresistible.” That is, Yue’s exaggerated laughing self-portraiture figure along with his automatic smile, “masks the underlying emotions” of the subjects in his work (Pace Gallery). There is almost so much bad going on, that the subjects in Yue’s pieces have to laugh their sadness away (Egna 2020). Evidently, Yue’s work amplifies the disturbing past and current events in China. In addition, Pace shares that Yue has challenged socialist paintings, by recreating iconic events in China and replacing the “heroes” in them with his laughing face. Yue states, “those typical socialist paintings in China looked very realistic but were indeed surreal. They served for heroic fantasies, and the images of great people or the heroes in the paintings could well justify the fabricated scenes” (Pace Gallery). Thus, Yue believes that scenes that Chinese political regimes promoted were many times augmented, with fabricated messages.
After reading this write-up on Yue, I have begun to think more about Yue’s shift in artistic style, and how he essentially developed a politically uncensored technique that diverged so much from other coerced Chinese work. Additionally, I will further research Yue’s recreation of socialist-type art, as altering grim events through his work seems to be important to him.
Work cited
Max Egna, Yue Minjun Execution Analysis, April 17th, 2020
https://muse.union.edu/aah194-spr20/2020/04/17/execution-analysis-max-egna/
“Yue Minjun.” Pace Gallery. Accessed April 29, 2020.
This post has allowed me to think more about some of the personal aspects of my project. Since I’m doing political posters, I’m not necessarily focusing upon a singular artist, however it may still be beneficial to narrow my focus to a select few in order to develop a narrative.