Yue Minjun Daqing, Heilongjiang Province, China, b. 1962
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Yue Minjun is among the most recognized figures of Chinese contemporary art, celebrated for his unmistakable imagery of laughing self-portraits that have become emblematic of an entire generation.
b. 1962, Daqing, Heilongjiang Province, China
Lives and works in Beijing, China
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His paintings, sculptures, and installations form a coherent universe of irony and introspection, reflecting the shifting cultural identity of post-reform China.
Yue Minjun graduated from the Fine Arts Department of Hebei Normal University in 1985. He began developing his distinctive artistic language in the early 1990s, emerging as part of the Cynical Realism movement that followed the Tiananmen generation. His international breakthrough came with his participation in the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), followed by major exhibitions at the Gwangju Biennale and Shanghai Biennale (both 2004), which established him on the global stage.
At the core of Yue Minjun’s practice is the recurring motif of his own face, fixed in an exaggerated, unsettling laughter. Repeated across paintings, sculptures, and installations, this expression operates as a visual device rather than a psychological portrait. Multiplied and displaced into diverse contexts, the laughing figure functions simultaneously as self-image and mask — a form through which the artist examines distance, repetition, and the mechanics of representation.
Visually, Yue Minjun merges the refined clarity of graphic illustration with the theatrical expressiveness of caricature. His palette — dominated by bright pinks, blues, and acid tones — creates an atmosphere of artificial cheerfulness that contrasts with the psychological tension beneath the surface. Drawing on both Western art history and Chinese socialist realism, he reconstructs iconic images — from Delacroix and Manet to Cultural Revolution propaganda — replacing every protagonist with his identical smiling figure. Through this strategy of repetition and substitution, Yue dismantles established hierarchies of meaning, exposing how collective emotion is shaped by ideology and spectacle.
Beginning in the late 2010s, Yue Minjun developed the Maze series — a body of work that marked a new direction in his practice. Drawing on spatial principles from the shan shui painting tradition, he constructs intricate labyrinthine structures from natural motifs such as stone, wood, plants, and birds. In these compositions, the maze operates both as a physical construct and as a metaphor for the layered, often disorienting nature of contemporary experience. By reinterpreting classical aesthetics through a contemporary visual idiom, the Maze series opens another line of inquiry in Yue Minjun’s work, reflecting on history, perception, and the shifting relationship between past and present.
Yue Minjun’s works are held in numerous public collections worldwide, including M+ Museum of Visual Culture (Hong Kong), Guangdong Museum of Art (Guangzhou), Shenzhen Art Museum (China), Chengdu Shanghe Museum (China), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (USA), Denver Art Museum (USA), François-Mitterrand Cultural Center (France), Busan Museu
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