Interview with Karen Smith

ue Minjun is a central figure in the generation of creatively attuned, self-styled individuals that emerged in the early 1990s. Its members were ultimately responsible for driving Ycontemporary art practice in into its important second phase, which has run from the early 1990s to the present (This phase followed the first wave, which began in 1985 with the New Wave Movement). Today, almost everything that constitutes the bedrock of contemporary art in China, its ambitions and its motifs, its contradictions, focus, and forms, can be traced back to the decade of the 1990s and the handiwork of this early second-wave generation. Yue Minjun joined the “chorus” in 1991 when he moved to . A few years later, he had won himself a leading role. Although as a young boy he was already drawn to art, Yue Minjun—unlike many of his peers—was sent to work before he could apply to one of the nation’s art academies. It took him a bit of time to navigate the system, but his perseverance in persuading his supervisors to allow him attend university eventually paid off. In 1985, he embarked on a year long course in the oil department of Hebei Normal University. Upon graduation, he moved to Beijing to join the first “settlers” in the Yuanmingyuan area, named for the old imperial summer palace nearby. Located in the northwest suburbs of the city, it was rapidly shaping up as an artists’ village.

It was not entirely a random event or location. In the early 1990s, this swath of rural land, which borders the northern edge of the capital’s university district, was rezoned as part of an urban redevelopment area. The city proper was preparing to expand in order to accommodate the accelerating level of residential and commercial development that Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform policy (first implemented in 1978) was finally precipitating. By the end of the 1990s, it would lead to an explosion in real estate development and a bubbling property market. Against this tide of change, small agricultural holdings on the fringe of Beijing were at the time becoming less profitable and harder to work. It was here that an initial, largely unsanctioned phase of residential building work began. The farmers who formerly worked the now-decommissioned farmland began to erect cheap, almost prefab housing in the vernacular style: small buildings with self-contained courtyards. Although by today’s standards, the rents sound low—a couple hundred yuan a month, with seven yuan to the U.S. dollar—in the early 1990s it was an owners’ market. Landlords could charge more or less whatever the market would stand, and given the artists’ desire for independence, in their case, it stood for quite a lot. Even so, the cost of living was generally low, so once the rent was paid, artists didn’t need much cash in hand to support their lifestyles. Yue Minjun and his colleagues were the first group of “independent” individuals willing to give self-sufficiency a go—a huge step for any person in China, where, at the time, everyone’s life was governed by the work unit to which they were assigned. The work unit provided all basic necessities, including the ration coupons required to buy even basic foodstuffs like rice and oil. In early 1990, the first artist pioneers had moved into Yuanmingyuan. By 1994, just a few years later, the village was home to more than one hundred artists. Yue Minjun was one of the enviable handful who enjoyed not only a growing reputation and critical acclaim but representation abroad (Schoeni Art Gallery, ), and had several successful exhibitions to his credit. Since that time, Yue Minjun’s career has gone from strength to strength. Today, he is widely acclaimed as one of China’s leading painters—one of the four modern-day Chinese masters known affectionately and humorously as the si da jingang, or the four cornerstones of contemporary , an elite which includes , , and (although there’s a larger group of contenders hot on their heels).

25 Yue Minjun in studio, Yuanmingyuan District, Beijing, 1992. Courtesy of the artist.

Here, on the occasion of his first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. (Yue Minjun and the Symbolic Smile, Queen’s Museum, New York, October 14, 2007–January 6, 2008), Yue Minjun talks about his life and work. He describes how he came to choose the contemporary end of the creative spectrum, how he arrived at his signature character with the ludicrous laughing face, and how he worked this motif into a special series of watercolour works on paper. He speaks with Karen Smith, a curator and art critic specializing in contemporary Chinese art, at his studio in Beijing.

Karen Smith: When did the big smile, the laughing face, first appear in your work?

Yue Minjun: You can find it in the early I created as far back as 1990. At that time, before I arrived at Yuanmingyuan—the artists’ village—a large exhibition of contemporary art made by the new generation of Chinese artists was held at our main national gallery of arts in Beijing. It was called China/Avant Garde. One painting in particular made a great impression on me—Geng Jianyi’s huge painting titled The Second State. It was huge because it was made up of four separate panels lined up in a row, each one depicting a single human face that filled the entire picture plane with an expression of laughter. At first, it made me think of the Maitreya Buddha, which is a smiling, pot-bellied Buddha. His smile is meant to remind people to hold dear the truth of Buddhist teachings in all the goals we set ourselves in life; to remind us that even in the face of conflict and adversity, and injustice, we should not lose control, nor give in to negative feelings.

Geng Jianyi’s painting was the antithesis of all that is positive about the Maitreya Buddha’s expression and symbolism. The four smiles in The Second State spoke of a world where things were not right, in which meaning had been inverted, and expressions turned upside down. Clearly, Geng intended to remind us that nothing is as it appears. For according to a clinical definition of a smile, his faces were smiling, but that’s not how it appears to the human heart and mind. So, this

26 “second” state is not the first state, meaning the familiar form of the smile, but an inversion of it, a distortion, which makes it about as far from being a real smile like the one the Buddha wears, as it is possible to imagine.

For my generation, the expression itself was not entirely alien. We were born into a bitterly frustrating era, infested with contradictions and complexities. Every one of us had a private sense that our existence was not entirely happy—yet we could not say exactly what happiness might be like, or how we’d know when we found it. We also instinctively felt that despite being given an opportunity to assert our independence [in being able to move to the Yuanmingyuan Artists’ Village of their own free will], as long as we were marginalized by society for our choice of lifestyle, our desire to explore individual creative impulses, and our inability to conform to social convention, then we could never be entirely happy. The Buddha’s smile suggests that in the future things will get better, that a future life could be beautiful. Tomorrow will be better. But against the reality of the times, which was so entirely chaotic and strange, it was hard to hold onto that faith.

So this is how it all began: I was thinking that the image of a laughing face ought to be perceived as an assurance that things would get better: that a future life could be as rewarding and meaningful as the Buddha promised. Geng Jianyi had shown that this might not be the case— at least, that such an expression deserved close scrutiny. I decided that my laughing faces would be my own personal reminder of our situation, and which would be easily understood by people around me, and ordinary folk, too, who had learned to laugh because they understood that any other response was futile.

Karen Smith: I think people will be wondering if everybody in China felt the same way at that time. Am I right in thinking that the vast majority of the Chinese people lived, worked, and existed under the same sort of circumstances—that most would belong to the same work unit during their entire working lives, and therefore follow a similarly linear existence?

Yue Minjun: That was more or less the case.

Karen Smith: Given that, can you say what you think it was that made you special, or so different from others that you dared to step outside those confines, to move to Yuanmingyuan and become an independent artist?

Yue Minjun: I think I was born independent. My parents tell me that as early as two or three years old, I was quite capable of taking care of myself; at least, of amusing myself. I could walk to kindergarten myself, and look after myself at home, without getting into any trouble!

Karen Smith: Do you have siblings?

Yue Minjun: Yes, two younger brothers. When I was small I also took care of them. I’d make breakfast, prepare our lunchboxes, and take them to school. I even did things around the house. It seemed to come naturally because neither of my parents recalls teaching me that these were things I ought to do. When it came to setting up house at Yuanmingyuan, I wasn’t fazed by it at all. I certainly didn’t see the obstacles that other artists saw. There were other more important issues to consider. To me it was natural to want to go it alone, but in truth, for the times, it was a rather alarming and radical challenge to conventional existence. I guess I did have some kind of a desire to rebel, although I don’t think it could be described as a conscious awareness of self, or of me

27 being different from others . . . or special in any way. None of us really wanted to stand out. I was primarily concerned about my future, about the possibilities that could be open to me if I was open to them. I didn’t want to have to resign myself to life as a worker in the way my parents had to do. I clearly remember thinking that if our society could not change, or accept change as part of modernization and advancement, there would be no point in striving for anything at all. Daily life would come to mean a dull, entirely meaningless existence.

Karen Smith: But in that time—in the early 1990s, in the immediate aftermath of the student demonstrations in Tian’anmen in early 1989, and the crackdown that brought them to an end on June 4—to have possessed such a strong sense of yourself and your own volition was quite an extraordinary quality in your character, no?

Yue Minjun: I don’t think my intuition could be called exactly a strong awareness of self. But at that time, I was thinking about the point or purpose of a person’s existence. Following June 4, there was a meeting at the school [where he was teaching], which was called to discuss the future [in light of the new government directives]. I remember feeling that if society hadn’t changed then perhaps I wouldn’t have dared to think about breaking out. But society was already changed because of the socioeconomic change prompted by Deng Xiaoping’s policy of openness and reform. It was impossible to imagine that such change could be erased entirely from the collective memory, or the whiff of freedom that people had tasted could be eradicated. We all sensed that this was just the beginning. There was a definite scent of freedom in the air. My greatest desire at that moment was to be free to grow my hair long! Both at university, and in the various work units I had been assigned to, it was absolutely forbidden to let your hair grow long. That was a big reason for leaving.

Karen Smith: Where exactly were you at that time?

Yue Minjun: In 1990, I had a teaching job in Hebei that left me entirely unfulfilled and wondering what to do. And then, by a lucky turn of fate, in 1991, I stumbled upon the community of artists living at Yuanmingyuan. I knew immediately that this was the opportunity I’d been waiting for.

Karen Smith: What was that turn of fate?

Yue Minjun: It was a complete accident. When I was small, our family had lived for a brief period in Beijing at the Oil and Petroleum Institute. This is in the university district, which is very close to the old summer palace—only about twenty minutes by bicycle. The scenery there is very beautiful. At that time—even today—all art students would go there to study nature. When we were young, we did the same, so I was very familiar with it.

In 1991, I made a trip to Beijing to see one of my best friends. His mother had been diagnosed with cancer and was in a hospital near this district and the Yuanmingyuan. My friend’s father had rented a small house nearby to be close to the mother’s hospital. That’s where I stayed. During the visit, I was struck by the fact that there were many artists living in the same neighbourhood—Yang Shaobin was renting a studio in the same yard, which doubled as his home. It was amazing to see them living as I always imagined artists to live: an ideal life to me.

Karen Smith: How did you know they were artists? Did they already have long hair then?

28 Yue Minjun: Some of them! They were just so different from my main circle of friends at that time. All my life I had lived in state-owned enterprises, first as a child with my parents in the oil fields in Daqing in the northeast of China, then in Hubei province when they were transferred in 1969, and finally in Beijing in 1972. After completing high school in 1980, I was sent to work at the Haiyang State Oil Company in Tianjin, and from there was transferred to the oil refinery in Hebei in 1983. It was there that I persuaded my director to send me to university to study art. When I graduated in 1989, I returned to the work unit in Hebei. I had been assigned a teaching job in the teaching training college that was affiliated with the company.

Compared with life at the work unit, trying to survive the Yuanmingyuan as an independent artist didn’t seem so very hard—Chinese work units were uniformly complex bureaucracies that operated within an extremely narrow set of regulations, which were largely inflexible and absolutely incapable of making any concession to individuals within their employ, because all people were supposed to be equal and the same. Of course, they weren’t all equal: everything depended upon maintaining good relations within a complex web of interpersonal connections. This made these work units a potential minefield, which placed an enormous pressure upon those it “owned.” Everyone had to appear to do the right thing all the time. The socialist machine simply had no place for individual ambition. Conforming was an all-consuming activity in the work life of many individuals. At least that much was the same for everybody in China at that time. Which, incidentally, is why to laugh, to assume a smile in order to mask your real feelings of helplessness, has such resonance for my generation.

It was only in the late 1980s that there was any change in the status quo, but it was still impossible to imagine an alternative mode of living. Even in the early 1990s, the authorities did their best to encourage people to believe that it was impossible to exist outside the system. For this reason, most people could not conceive of stepping out of the state structure. It must have seemed mad to move to Yuanmingyuan with the aim of becoming an independent artist. Yet for some reason that is exactly what I felt compelled to do. The rents were low, and the environment was everything the work unit wasn’t. The village was a familiar and comfortable environment for me. This familiarity with the area made the move even more natural. Most importantly, there, I was free to decide how to spend my days, and, of special delight at the time, how long I grew my hair!

Karen Smith: How did you imagine you would support yourself?

Yue Minjun: Well, initially, I didn’t intend to leave the work unit. The plan was to take a sick leave—to find a doctor who could diagnose some kind of illness that required about six months off work, or even a year if possible. That way I could still claim a bit of money and have something to fall back on if I ran into any problems in Beijing. However, it didn’t quite work out like that, and in the end, my director dismissed me anyway.

Karen Smith: What did you need to support yourself at that time?

Yue Minjun: My rent was initially one hundred yuan, and then went up to two hundred yuan when I moved into a slightly better place. Also, for most of my time there, I shared a studio with Yang Shaobin, which helped keep costs down. The only real concern was money to buy materials.

Karen Smith: Were you finally able to make a bid for freedom in 1991 when you moved to the Artists’ Village?

29 Yue Minjun, Noah’s Ark, 2005, oil on canvas, 300 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist and AW ASIA, New York.

Yue Minjun: Yes, that’s right.

Karen Smith: How did you get started? You have mentioned that at that point the big smile was already beginning to establish itself as a motif in your work.

Yue Minjun: In the beginning I experimented with a range of styles, including those of other artists I knew who were living in the village. None of them felt quite right. I found myself looking more at the artists themselves, reflecting on the nature of the life we were living, and the personalities that were contributing to it. This whole energy said something about the times and the aspirations of the artists, but also about the complex emotions that were part and parcel of our independent status. I began to make these artists the subject of my paintings. Initially, it wasn’t clear where my instinct would lead me, but that changed when I decided to paint myself. Again, at first it was intuitive, but it was a conscious move away from depicting recognizable personalities towards finding a form that could express my ideas. The smile was the first step. Using my own features was the second. I could take more liberties with my own features, and from the first painting, I realized that this was something I could really work with.

The next breakthrough came when I made a painting of multiple images of myself, all in a line, each one as dumb-looking as the next. I discovered that by using one figure and repeating it, I had created a generic being, like a cartoon character. It represented a caricature of reality, of human experience, and could be used to narrate stories of our experiences and the situations we encounter. The activities and scenes I set him in would be familiar to most viewers, yet imbued with an unexpected twist that would require a more studied look at the painting. I wouldn’t make it all hard: by using the same figure over and over again, retaining him even where the work went through different stages of development, I could shift the focus to the story, and use him and his “adventures” to narrate a series of different messages. That’s how “he” acquired a life of his own, and is now a motif, or rather a character, that is recognizable to all people. Being acquainted with

30 him, they don’t come up against a barrier to looking at the work and subliminally ingesting the message. There’s an interest in seeing his latest antics that softens the idea that my art might be exclusive or beyond their understanding. This aspect of his existence became very important for me. It governed the nature of my style of painting, because the act of applying paint to canvas was primarily about illustrating a situation, rather than expressing a psychological mood.

Karen Smith: I guess that’s why there’s a constant smoothness to the surface of the paintings.

Yue Minjun: Yes, that’s why.

Karen Smith: It seems that by the end of the 1990s this motif had undergone an enormous change. At the same time, for the greater part of those years, this image was being read by local critics and foreigners, in largely superficial terms, as a political statement on life in China. Not everyone looked at it in the context of a bigger picture, as your means of satirizing human existence, relationships, and the situations we all experience—albeit in slightly different guises, courtesy of the cultural and political frameworks in which we exist. How did you see it?

Yue Minjun: At first, the smile might seem like a simple cynical device, but as with many well- known cartoon characters, the facial expression never changes too much. Even when there’s a smile, or a burst of anger, only a small, relevant part of the face moves. So when you are confronted by such a character, you are already trained to look beyond the features to the essence of the character, and the way you understand it to interact with the world. The actual drawing of the figure doesn’t express much of this essence directly: “he” has to go out into the world and engage with his life. It’s by seeing the stories he acts in, as they unfold, that we understand the attitude he encapsulates—or in truth, the attitude that the creator injects into his creation.

Having repeated the form of this figure in paintings again and again, it’s a question I often get asked: am I, in fact, repeating myself? Shouldn’t I try to do something more with the image? But it occurred to me that as people get older, and as they acquire more experience, they see things quicker, and more clearly. The repeated use of a visual motif creates a sense of familiarity, which in turn allows viewers to go beyond the superficial aspects and engage with the specific situation in which I have placed him. So the work is really about bigger questions relating to human nature than about referencing temporal events. After all, things happen every day; there’s always some incident unfolding somewhere that seems important at the time. But time is also a great leveller. It puts things into perspective. Human nature, however, is a far more compelling subject. In the grand scheme of things, it changes little from generation to generation. We think we evolve but the emotions and responses are innate, and beyond all the psychology we subject them to.

For me, each series of works is like writing a play and mapping out a storyboard of crucial scenes from the plot. Much of the inspiration for these “plots” comes from my own frame of mind as I deal with the society around me, and from the moods this engenders, or incidents I witness. Many compositions can be traced back to scenes that I have observed unfolding around me.

The most important thing for an artist to know is how to move forward with the work. Or else you paint a few paintings like this, a few like that . . . and then what do you do? So for me the biggest meaning is that the figure is like an actor: it can act for me any story I give it. It is flexible.

31 Yue Minjun, Hats Series—Within, Without the Great Wall, 2005, oil on canvas, 300 x 220 cm. Courtesy of the artist and AW ASIA, New York.

Karen Smith: A recent series played with the idea of hats, and all the professions, social status and identities that hats signify. What inspired that?

Yue Minjun: My interest in the hat was piqued during the Olympic Games in Athens, when various hats were used to denote the ranking of the medal winners. They were all based around the shape of an olive. It was a harmless idea, intended to promote the fact of the games being held in Greece, where the whole concept of the games originated. It was also rather amusing. It made me think about the origin of hats, and how the symbolism of “the hat” evolved. Why was it that this particular accessory became the sign of a job, a social position? Or stranger still, how a hat could signify nationality, or an ethnic group? Today most societies don’t require people to wear hats. Those we see most commonly are part of a uniform that goes with a job—construction worker, policeman, soldier, nurse. People who choose to wear hats today usually use them to make statements about their personalities, so the hat becomes an extension of the wearer’s image. No one chooses a hat lightly: it has to be right. Unless it goes with the job—then you have no choice. So the placing of various hats on the figures in this series of paintings is about highlighting the role of the hat in asserting and reinforcing social differentials, and my sense of the absurdity of the ideas that govern the sociopolitical protocol surrounding hats.

Karen Smith: Is this appropriation of a piece of human experience similar to Word Moves, a series from the late 1990s? In those works, you used the form or shape of Chinese characters as the basis for a sequence of postures and gestures that you made your figure adopt.

Yue Minjun: In a way. And you could say the same for the more recent series Free and at Leisure, which traced the origins of martial arts poses and forms back to the world of nature and animals that inspired them. It was my girlfriend who pointed out that the original meaning of martial arts [which most Westerners equate with kung fu] in Chinese is “classical dance ballet.” One might describe these fighting skills as being rooted in an athletic dance. Most of the “steps” were

32 Yue Minjun, Kong Fu—I, 2005, oil on canvas, 220 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist and AW ASIA, New York. developed from long, intense observation of the actions or movements of different animals as they engaged in combat or confronted each other. Often, displays of strength are much more important than actual strength; if you can persuade an aggressor that you are the stronger party, you need never come to blows. Most important is agility and grace.

It was only through time that these movements evolved into a fighting art, and acquired their underlying tenor of aggression. There’s been a flood of kung fu films recently that have received huge attention in the West. It was partly this that inspired a group of paintings of my figure trying to copy the stance of various animals in the wild and looking quite ridiculous as he does so. To the Chinese people, kung fu represents a source of national strength and power as well as pride, because it’s such an ingrained tradition. But today, against the glamour of action films and on- screen violence, the essence of kung fu has been distorted. The contortions to which I subject the figures highlight how far the art has come from the innocence of its roots. This is also a good example that demonstrates my attitude towards my cultural history and framework, which I believe is quite a different attitude from most other people around me.

Karen Smith: Can you talk a little about the you have produced and how that work relates to other areas of your art production?

33 Yue Minjun, Kong Fu—II, 2005, oil on canvas, 220 x 200cm. Courtesy of the artist and AW ASIA, New York.

Yue Minjun: I began making sculpture in 1998. I had been invited to make some work for the Venice Biennale in 1999, and made a trip to look at the space. I discovered it was rather different from the kind of spaces in which I had exhibited before. First, each of the halls seemed to be enormous. That made it extremely difficult to think about a work on canvas. It was almost impossible to control the space, or take possession of the space with paintings, unless one created a single monumental composition right across the wall, which would have had to be almost twenty metres in length to make any sense. But on that scale it ran the risk of becoming simply a wall decoration. The next thought naturally was to create a physical object; a sculpture or installation would clearly work better within this environment. Sculpture can be placed anywhere in the space that works; it gives the exhibition a different rhythm for viewers. As a painter, I am not usually required to get involved with hanging the paintings for a show, so this was both a challenge and a pleasure. My generation was never really afforded that kind of experience: to be given a large space to work in that you could organize as you wanted. Anyway, it was this opportunity in 1999 that made me start to think about working with three-dimensional forms, and how the were conceived.

The image of the figure brought to the sculptures is exactly the same as used in the paintings. As had happened with my use of the figure in the early days, when I started repeating it, the same approach seemed logical for the sculptures. Here, I was drawn to making a visual parallel with the

34 Yue Minjun, Kong Fu—III, 2005, oil on canvas, 220 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist and AW ASIA, New York. extraordinary, 8,000-strong Qin dynasty terracotta warriors (221-206 B.C.): hundreds of figures that all appear to be exactly the same, but with minute differences, rather like human beings. And to create a contemporary “army” of my figures that would just stand there and confront people . . . what would viewers feel? It was an interesting question for me. So I started out with a huge ambition to create 1,000 figures, similar to the volume of the warriors, but having produced a first batch of twenty-five, all in the same pose, I realized what a mammoth scale this was about. Each of them is just a little bit bigger than me, so they take up quite a lot of space. I began to worry what I’d do with 1,000 of them. Where would I store them? How could they be protected? In the end, I cut the final number back to two hundred and fifty, which means that there are ten sets of twenty-five, each set comprising figures in a different position—some just stand, some have their hands behind their head, some carry flag poles, others stand on one leg . . . .

Karen Smith: From 1991 through today, what is the greatest success you feel you have achieved?

Yue Minjun: It is in being able to develop a strong sense of what it is that I am doing, and clarity in what I wish to express. That is essential, and it requires a lot of hard work to achieve it.

Karen Smith: In the 1990s, it was a huge and brave step to become an independent artist. Today, Chinese artists are no longer marginalized. Their position has shifted from fringe member to

35 Yue Minjun, Contemporary Terracotta Warriors (detail), 2005, bronze, 55 x 182 x 55 cm each. Private Collection. Courtesy of the artist and AW ASIA, New York. leading figure in society: they are the new society’s celebrities. Previous political adversaries have laid down their “arms,” even to the point of supporting exhibitions such as your solo show in the He Xiangning Art Museum in in 2006. Of course, not everyone needs to have an opponent to goad them on, but surely a good punching bag helps. In present times, who or what plays this role?

Yue Minjun: In the 1990s, society was not so open, but then neither were we. Today we have access to so much more information. The type of work artists are creating, as well as the range of subject matter that they are working with, is increasingly pluralistic. It’s impossible to hold on to the simple perceptions we started out with, or fall into the trap of making impulsive responses to situations—political, social, or economic—the moment they happen. An artist needs to speak beyond his time.

The demands placed on the artist today are growing at quite a rate. This makes it hard for emerging artists to find their place, and to settle down to evolving their thoughts and individual styles. Culture today in China cannot be a simple extension of traditional Chinese culture— something as rudimentary as adding a new stroke to a masterwork of ink painting, or using the same standards and criteria to evaluate a work. Having said this, Chinese artists seem much more mature—perhaps because they can now confidently go about their work without having to worry about the difficulties of showing it, or even selling pieces. It’s a much healthier arena for contemporary artists in China today, which means they can focus on exploring new ground, with new ideas and new philosophies that push each generation into new territory.

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