Yue Minjun

Born in 1962 in Daqing, Heilongjiang province, and now living and working in Beijing, Yue Minjun is widely regarded as the best-known member of China's Cynical Realism movement and, in the words of Galerie Templon, "the leading light of contemporary Chinese art." After graduating from the Fine Arts Department of Hebei Normal University, he worked on offshore oil drilling platforms and taught art before joining the artists' village at Yuanmingyuan and later settling in Songzhuang — a decisive turn he recalls fondly: "Having just left a fairly restrictive institutional school, I felt a real sense of freedom."

His signature image — rows of grinning, pink-faced "laughing men" modeled on his own features, multiplying across canvases of vivid colour — has become a cultural icon in its own right. In the mid-1990s, critic Li Xianting gave Yue Minjun and his peers the label "Cynical Realism"; as the artist himself puts it, these painters "went back to painting things that were authentic and credible."

International recognition arrived in 1999 with his participation in the 48th Venice Biennale, followed by the Gwangju and Shanghai Biennales in 2004. The year 2007 proved extraordinary: his painting The Massacre at Chios sold for HK$31.68 million at Sotheby's Hong Kong, and months later Execution achieved HK$38.12 million at Sotheby's London — then the highest price ever paid for a work by a Chinese contemporary artist. That same year, Time magazine named him one of its People of the Year, the only artist and the only Chinese figure on a list that included Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. Time offered this verdict: "If you believe that China is intimately tied to the present and future of this world, then this is the artist painting China." In 2012, the Fondation Cartier in Paris honoured him with a major retrospective, the first Chinese artist so invited.

His works are held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Busan Museum of Art, and Hong Kong's M+ Sigg Collection, among many others.

Asked about his decades of repeating the laughing figure, he answers with conviction: "The repeated paintings themselves prove that the attitude behind the creation has never changed... Repetition is precisely where the power lies." His 2023 solo exhibition "Happiness" at Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing, opened with the beloved laughing men and unfolded into new Flowers and Labyrinth series — a turn, as the gallery notes, from Cynical Realism toward "magic realism," and from critique toward "coexistence and symbiosis." The smile, it seems, still has new worlds to open.