Feature: Yue Minjun and His Big Laugh 08:02, September 24, 2007
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Feature: Yue Minjun and his big laugh 08:02, September 24, 2007 In his early 30s, Yue Minjun found a way out of his pain -- laugh at the world around him. He developed an urge to paint his wild laugh on canvas: a group of Yues laughing during war games, laughing while flying on the backs of geese and laughing during historical events. Yue, 44, has a reason to laugh in the real world now. His painting, "The Pope" -- a giggling Yue dressed as a Pope -- sold for 2.14 million pounds, about 30 million yuan, at Sotheby's London auction in June, setting a record for a piece of contemporary Chinese art. "Chinese contemporary" usually refers to the modern art produced since China's reform and opening-up began in 1979. The previous record was set by Liu Xiaodong's oil painting, "The New Migrants of the Three Gorges", which sold for 22 million yuan at Beijing Poly Auction in November 2006. The laughing reveals Yue's confusion in a quickly changing world. "China has been through a transition period since the Cultural Revolution. The people became more individualized than their previous collective existence," says Yue in his large studio in suburban Beijing. "The great social changes have caused psychological reactions in individuals -- not only happiness, but also fear of the unknown future. The wild laugh maybe is a try to cover the fear." Viewers draw different impressions from his work: some read pain behind the laughter and some see insanity. "I always believe different people should have different views of any work. As long as the work attracts them, makes them think, or just interests them. That's enough," he says. Yue's own life was filled with changes. He migrated constantly across China with his parents who were oil workers. He worked as an oil field electrician for almost five years after graduation from high school and then studied oil painting at Hebei Normal University. He resigned his "secured" job as an oil painting teacher in a Hebei college to join a group of artists at a village near the Yuanmingyuan park in Beijing. The community was widely known as the Yuanmingyuan painters village (now nonexistent) in the 1990s. Life was not easy there as the artists were viewed as 'mang liu', or jobless loafers, moving from their hometowns to live in big cities without permanent residential permits. Yue believed he had finally found the group he belonged to. "This was the artist's life I desired. Everything seemed terrific. It was not that hard to be an independent artist. The rents were not high and the environment was much better than my former danwei (workplace). Most important, I could suddenly decide my own life: how to spend a whole day or how long to keep my hair." His parents, however, wanted Yue to return to a normal life. Parents' opinions traditionally could influence their children, but Yue, then almost 30, was determined to follow his own path. The persistence helped Yue develop his laughing self-portraits. "I was inspired by movies. A movie star could play different roles, but the actor is always himself or herself, like Marilyn Monroe. Then I realized I could put my image in my paintings with different backdrops." The characters in his pieces were represented with large faces, open mouths and closed eyes, intoxicated with laughter. Yue Minjun had created his own icon of the times: an exaggerated self. "Icons are omnipresent theses days, like Lei Feng, Marilyn Monroe, Yao Ming. If you become an icon, you can enter somebody's blood. I build myself into an icon and then make fun of icons so as to make the society more interesting," Yue says. In backdrops, such as the French Revolution, he seems to be enjoying a practical joke on the world and explaining the turbulent world with humor. Yue says he diminishes the seriousness of major events. "What they claim they have to do so is absurd to me, like revolutions and killings. I believe there must be other choices. After so long, humankind still hasn't found a way to handle these things. I thought it was big so I diminished it a bit to make people think instead of just laugh," Yue says. In real life, he is keeping a sharp eye on the world around him. "You have to keep thinking and observing. You can't rest all the time. Thinking nothing can only result in painting nothing," Yue says. "Labor is an important part of life." Yue says he is a person who "laughs more at heart", contradicting the stereotype that artists must suffer to be inspired. Many years ago, in talks with distinguished critic Li Xianting, he revealed his dark moments when working as an electrician. At that time, he worked at an offshore oil platform for 20 days straight and used his 20 days leave for painting. Sometimes he stayed there for 40 days. "When I came back, I found myself unable to talk normally," said Yue, "You would be quite abnormal if you were isolated from the environment you needed, quite abnormal." Another shock came from the contradiction of the real world and his education and upbringing. "I grew up in closed communities in oil companies with little contact with the outside world. My education mainly came from teachers and families who would tell you what to do or not to do and what kind of dreams you should have. I had been living in a fixed module. I believed such a life was normal and promising." But in the wider world, he found things were different from what he had learnt. He began to rely on himself and seeking something he had lost. Now his anxieties mainly come from art itself. "Art is close to ideology or thought. Some believe the key to art is technique, which actually doesn't directly influence art. Most important is human thought, or the borders of thought. The same is with physics and maths where people work to break through the borders of human thought," Yue says. "Art is the exploration to break through in the visual world." Yue is also experimenting with new styles, such as the "scene" series. He removes the major subjects or individuals from classic paintings and keeps only the scene. For example, his version of The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David has no Marat. Different from the hilarious laughing ones, the extremely silent pictures are disconcerting: something is missing. "The pieces will cause a kind of distance in viewers' heads. They have no characters. The viewer might doubt whether the original ever existed or whether the theme was true." In his "maze" series, the theme is "searching". "The inspiration came from children's mazes," Yue says. "In the real world, everyone is searching for something no matter what profession you are engaged in, physics, chemistry, politics or law. "It impresses me that everyone seems to have clarity around them, but to my understanding, everyone is in a maze. You find one room and think you have the answer, but forget the moment you leave and enter another maze. Always unable to find an exit. Confusion." The "Searching for Terrorism" works are most representative of the maze series. "It looks like a game to me. America went to Afghanistan to search for Bin Laden. War after war, they found nothing. "The superficial thing is searching, but the deep root is collisions between religions. No one knows how to tackle it. It's like in a maze, you catch two terrorists in one room and then there are more in other rooms.There seem to be no answer." Critic Li Xianting calls Yue Minjun an important figure in a cynical realist movement that emerged in the early 1990s; a man who "constructs his artistic language as a self-ironic response to the spiritual vacuum and folly of modern life". Critic Jim Supangkat says, "Yue Minjun and his counterparts employ plain, boring and absurd scenes from life to ridicule society with a discerning eye." Detractors say Yue's pieces are not profound, overrated in market, or catering to Western tastes. "I like painting and can only paint. Life's not too awful if I can paint," says Yue. "Since I was a child, I've always had an urge to paint something I had seen. In my childhood when I saw a beautiful girl, I would paint her after returning home. Just like writers in their childhood would use words to describe the things he had seen, we used images and colors." "Things that have aroused the feeling may be quite different from the things you want to paint... There must be a lot phenomena, information inside you, like a thickly tangled clot." "For example, If you saw a bird had just flied before your eyes, suddenly you would want to create something," said Yue who likes constantly staring outside of window when thinking and talking. "Source: Xinhua" .