This great gathering will become a historical memory! This graffiti has recorded our rebellion and craziness! A book of Chinese art history starts the new era of arts!
Yue Minjun June 18th, 2007
Work in brush and ink on xuan paper (70x140)
Yue Minjun was born in 1962 in Daqing city, Heilongjiang province, a city built up after the discovery of oil there in 1959. Yue Minjun's memory was formed by the difficult life and bitter cold winters in that frontier town. For a long period, Yue Minjun was constantly on the move with his itinerant parents:
In 1966 our family was reassigned to the Jianghan Oilfields in Hubei.i.vvhen we all moved to Hubei, I saw a lot of street fighting and some hotels had machine-gun emplacements out the front. It had not seemed that terrible in Daqing, which maintained its economic growth, but after we left, things completely changed. The deepest impression in Hubei was Wuhan, and the hotel in which we lived had antiaircraft guns inside, and there was some fierce fighting
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“If I wanted to display the absurdity of this society, I had the simple idea at the time that it was better to use images of myself rather than of others. I didn't mind saying that I was a fool or the most stupid person! I had that right! The minimum requirement was that it was a choice I made not something forced on me. This also avoided some of the pressure at that time and might have had something to do with my psychology..”
At the same time, Fang Lijun was depicting his own 'shaved head', while Liu Wei was painting himself with his army parents. Cynicism dictated the adoption of a mode of self-mocking humor to demonstrate that individuals had been reduced to a state of powerlessness. Indeed, when he was having a difficult day selling water-melon and pancakes, a smile helped the artist cope. Yue Minjun repeats his stereotyped image of smiling in all his paintings, revealing the spiritual stagnation he felt as a result of his bewilderment. As the artist said: 'Smiling is a way of refusing to think deeply, and when you're troubled by things and can't bring yourselfto think about them, then that's one way of getting rid ofthe thoughts'. [12] To some extent, Yue records his awkward state of mind in his paintings of that period: He had no status, rights or prospects, and he could only attempt to obtain psychological comfort by repeatedly smiling and making jokes. Later Yue Minjun linked his self-mockery with the ancient Chinese philosophy of life:
Perhaps this kind of smile includes many meanings, including self-mockery, irony and escape in the face of reality. For example, if a question is answered with a smile, then it's a kind of philosophy of life. It may have evolved together with China's traditional culture, for example Laozi's attempt to escape reality and objection to society's attempts to shackle the natural person, and of course it also has a passive connotation.
Artists in Art History. Lü Peng.
Artists in Art History. Lü Peng.