When you’re smiling the whole world smiles with you? The faces of Yue Minjun

A laugh can be inviting, it can be derisive, it can also be contagious. Laughter loves company, because there is always a part of us that wants others to laugh with us. Laughter usually inspires positive connotations: laughing with friends over drinks, laughing at a hilarious episode of The Office (the British version, of course), or engaging in witty repartee. But what happens when laughter becomes sinister, mocking, or even grotesque?

I asked myself these questions when looking at the oeuvre of Chinese Contemporary artist Yue Minjun, whose works are currently displayed at the Berkeley Art Museum. Yue’s works form part of the Cynical Realist movement, a modern art movement that developed in the 90’s in Beijing. Works associated with Cynical Realism have a pragmatic, humorous, and ironic tone that often comment on on the pursuit of the individual within a collective society. Yue’s work can almost always be identified by a multitude of widely laughing faces, usually representing the artist himself, against looming and bright backdrops. I can’t help but wonder: what does this incessant and excessive amount of laughter mean? There is something eerie and disturbing about its seriality and obsessive repetition, almost as if laughter becomes ubiquitous and devoid of intimacy.
La Liberté guidant le peuple (1995) is a particularly fascinating work that plays on Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting of the same name painted in 1830. Rather than depicting Liberty as a voluptuous and bare breasted female, Liberty undergoes a complete transformation becoming a lanky male in a white t-shirt and brown leather sandals. There is no distinction between leader and subject. Does this indicate that liberty is absent, overly present, or a mere non-entity? What does it mean to make liberty among the mass collective? Eyes closed to the uncertain future, smiles are nevertheless plastered across each identical face. Seemingly looking forward to change, figures raise their arms in triumph. What is the real meaning of triumph here? In the Delacroix, revolution marks the end of monarchical rule, thus evoking a real sense of victory and sacrifice. Yue’s portrayal of revolution is much more ambiguous. During the Cultural Revolution, artists were obligated to portray peasants content in their surroundings and bearing a white smile. Clearly, Yue makes a parody of such paintings, with the clear connotation that sacrifice and triumph are illusory.

Within modern China sacrifice even seems unnecessary and devalued. In the face of modernization and westernization individual identity is lost. However, Yue’s work is not simply a discussion of individuality versus collectivity. Hidden beneath the immediacy of his works is a political commentary that reveals the all too rapid shifting of identities, landscapes, and values intrinsic to modernity. Urbanization threatens to impose itself onto populace, depicted as non-descriptive skyscrapers that menacingly seep into the foreground. Reflected in the water without windows, the architecture is just as anonymous as the subjects of the painting. Just as in his other important work Everybody Connects, people are reproduced and discarded like objects on a conveyor belt.



Disconcerting in the least, Yue provokes his viewer to question his or her place within modernity and the inevitable grey area that we have inherited from an overly modernized world. Too cynical for you? Keep in mind Yue is a Cynical Realist.

Zoe Langer