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YUE MINJUN

b. 1962, Heilongjiang, China

Currently lives and works in Beijing, China

 

Yue Minjun is one of the leading figures of Chinese contemporary art and an internationally renowned artist.

Having graduated from Hebei Normal University in 1983 with a major in oil painting, he currently lives and works in Beijing, China. Yue Minjun has been creating this exaggerated “Self-image” since the beginning of the 1990s. In recent years, this image has expanded further into the field of sculpture and printmaking. Sometimes the “laughing man” appears independently, or collectively in depictions of daily life. Through the “laughing man”, who squints his eyes, laughing and grinning exaggeratedly with dramatic gestures, Yue interrogates social phenomena in an ironic and cynical manner.

 

Since participating in the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, Yue has been invited every year as one of the recurring contemporary Chinese artists at the Venice Biennale, which demonstrates his profound artistic contribution, and his distinctive artistic characteristics have established the non-negligible importance of contemporary Chinese art on the world stage.      

 

He became the cover story of Time magazine in 2007, and was nominated as one of the “Person of the Year 2007 - People Who Mattered.” On the list which included prominent figures such as Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, and Hilary Clinton, amongst others, Yue was the only artist and only Chinese national to be nominated. As Time described Yue Minjun: “If you think China has a close relationship with the current and future status of the world, then this is the man to paint China.”     

 

Yue Minjun’s artworks have been widely collected by various domestic and foreign art institutions, galleries, and museums. This includes the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Culture Centre of Francois Mitterrand, the Busan Museum of Art, the Guangdong Museum of Art, the Shenzhen Art Museum, amongst other important institutions.