Yue Minjun

Yue Minjun was born in 1962 in Daqing, Heilongjiang, and lives and works in Beijing. He is the best-known name in Cynical Realism; Galerie Templon called him "the leading light of contemporary Chinese art." Hebei Normal University, then offshore oil platforms and teaching, then Yuanmingyuan and Songzhuang. Of that turn he says: "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 about HK$31.68 million at Sotheby's Hong Kong, and months later Execution sold for £2,932,500 (about US$5.9 million; then reported as HK$46.2 million) at Sotheby's London — then the highest price ever paid for a work by a Chinese contemporary artist. That same year, Time included him in its “People Who Mattered” package; Vladimir Putin was Person of the Year. The same list also featured figures such as 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 (L’Ombre du fou rire), described by the foundation as his first major European exhibition.

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 solo exhibition Eudaimonia at Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing (15 December 2022–15 February 2023), 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.