Renowned Chinese artist Yue Minjun has become the latest target among nationalist internet influencers and netizens in China, some of whom accuse him of insulting the country and tarnishing the army's image with his iconic “laughing man” paintings. ”.
Tweets and comments condemning the 61-year-old Beijing-based artist, one of China's most prominent contemporary painters, began emerging on social media platforms Weibo, WeChat and Douyin (TikTok in China) this week, after a local think tank called “Kun O Lun Ce Institute” republished a 2021 essay on its official WeChat account that criticized the artist's works for insulting the People's Liberation Army (PLA), China's military force. On Friday, May 26, images of what is believed to be Yue Minjun's work related to the PLA appear to have been censored on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.
Recent attacks on Yue Minjun appear to be in line with a series of crackdowns and censorships taking place this month across China, including in Hong Kong, of voices deemed disrespectful to authorities, particularly the PLA.
On May 17, comedy company “Shanghai Xiaoguo Culture Media Co” was fined 13.35 million yuan (US$1.9 million), along with the confiscation of 1.35 million yuan (US$191,270) of “illegal gains” after one of his performances was accused of “harming society” with a joke about the military. Malaysian comedian Nigel Ng, who plays the character Uncle Roger, was silenced this week on social media in China after making jokes about the country in one of his recent performances. Also last week, the Hong Kong newspaper “Ming Pao” cut a comic strip column by political cartoonist Wong Kei-kwan, who goes by the artist name Zunzi, after 40 years of publication.
As a key figure of the Cynical Realism movement led by artists who witnessed the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) that emerged in the 1990s following the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, Yue Minjun's depiction of exaggerated, laughing faces is considered self-portraits or his alter-ego. The works are widely seen as an iconic artistic expression and reflection of the country's transformative era and its rise as a global economic power.
Yue Minjun's work has been widely exhibited in China and abroad in recent decades. His most recent solo exhibition “Eudaimonia” at Tang Contemporary in Beijing, which closed on February 15, featured new works from this “Flower” series, as well as works depicting the recurring motif of the 'laughing man'. A review published on the Chinese website Artron praised the artist's advancement in recent years in creating a new body of work, continuing to reflect the human psyche amidst changing and unpredictable reality.
The resurfaced essay, however, takes aim at Yue Minjun's 2007 painting, “Armed Forces - Planche No. 17.” The work depicts three laughing men, each wearing a hat representing the PLA army, navy and air force, respectively. The figures also have what appear to be devil horns on their heads, sticking out of their hats. (Both hats and devil horns are recurring motifs in the artist's work.)
“Armed Forces - Planche No. 17” was pictured hanging in the He Art Museum (HEM) in 2021, a young private museum in Shunde of Guangdong, southern China. Artnet News contacted the museum to ask if the work is still on the wall, but has not received a response so far. The republished essay accused the exhibition of this work of being an “incident of an organized effort to insult the army and the Chinese Communist Party.” The text lists other paintings by Yue Minjun considered offensive to the army as well as former Chinese leaders.
The essay, reuploaded on May 18, the day after the Shanghai comedy company was fined, spread like wildfire on China's internet. A tweet on Weibo said the depiction of soldiers in the paintings was exaggerated. “They give people the impression that they were made deliberately,” wrote one user in a post that already has almost 80,000 likes. Another tweet stated that paintings like Yue Minjun's, which target the country's dignity, attract the West and, as a result, are sold for high prices.
Tang Contemporary, the gallery representing Yue Minjun, declined to comment. Yue Minjun could not be reached for comment. Yesterday, the artist posted a photo of a painting of a fragmented smiling face embedded in a Buddhist sculpture on his Instagram.
Speaking about his art in a 2012 interview with the New York Times, Yue Minjun said that his paintings were not meant to be laughed at, as they were mostly self-portraits. But he then admitted that his work was a matter of reality, and “a smile does not necessarily mean happiness; it could be something else,” Yue Minjun told the New York Times. “And that laugh – anyone who has had the recent Chinese experience would understand.”
Yue Minjun gained international fame with the sale of his painting “Execution” (1995), which sold for a record £2.9 million ($5.97 million) at a Sotheby's London auction in October 2007, when the art Chinese contemporary has become one of the most sought after. Yue Minjun was listed as one of Time's People of the Year in 2007.
This record was broken the following year with the sale of his 1993 painting “Gweong-gweong” at a Christie's Hong Kong auction in May 2008, when the work sold for HK$54 million ($6.9 million), establishing Yue's auction record. Although auction prices for Yue Minjun's work have fallen in recent years as the Chinese contemporary art market craze has cooled, her works are still actively traded on the secondary market and widely exhibited.