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Born 1962, Daqing, Heilongjiang province, China, Yue Mingjun is one of the most expensive artists in the Chinese contemporary art scene, whose work is being snapped up for millions of dollars by Western collectors of Chinese contemporary art. The artist lives and works in Beijing, and his work has today been given the highest recognition by the Chinese government, which includes the grant of a museum all to himself which he can arrange for display as he pleases.

But Yue Mingjun's life was not always like this. He began as a struggling artist in the 1990s as a member of the artistic community at Yuan Ming Yuan in the outskirts of Beijing away from the penetrating eyes of political persecution. When the community broke up, Mingjun shifted to Tongxian, where he flourished, along with other artists.

The reason for his success can be attributed by what is known as "cynical realism" in post modernist art. Almost all his works so far, without exception, have contained self-portraits which from a distance look like they are bursting with mirth. But once one sees the gaping blackness of their mouths and eyes closed tightly shut, almost rolling in apparent hilarity in sad, desperate contexts, one realizes that the laughter could be a laughter of absurdity, of cynicism and of critical political commentary.

The laughter has been a hallmark of Mingjun's work, making it instantly recognizable, and it has been interpreted variously by different people at disparate points of time. But the artist himself sees his laughing self-portrait as a part of his evolution from the despair of his past, where reality was so very different from his idea of ideal existence. In his opinion, sometimes the only reaction left in the face of utter despair is laughter.

The laughter also comes in part from the Chinese tradition of the Laughing Buddha, whose permanent expression is that of laughter, and who is additionally a predictor of the future. Before devising that face-splitting grin on his self-portraits, Mingjun had also seen a painting by a different Chinese artist, Geng Jianyi, in which a grin was subverted to mean the opposite of the happiness it usually indicates.

Mingjun's technique has been flat and poster-like, the color of the faces of his portraits an unreal pink, in a flat, garish pop-art fashion. This stems in part from the posters he had seen of the Soviet communist era where all the people painted in the government posters depicted happy, laughing people, whereas the reality was quite something else.

In the political context of his time, he brought all these elements together in self-portraits, which enabled him greater freedom to laugh at himself and his environment, in a way which could be uneasy and thought- provoking for his audience.

One of the better-known paintings of his earlier years, "Execution"(1995) which depicts a row of the laughing self-portraits standing at the point of a gun, recently sold at a Sotheby's London auction for 5.9 million dollars. It is almost a parody of Manet's "Execution of Maximilian". It took its inspiration from the 1989 military crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and is representative of the kind of work he likes to do.

Mingjun's paintings have evolved from the enormous canvases he used to work on earlier and is now placed in smaller, yet more ironic backdrops. The skin of his self-portraits has taken on the yellowish hue of standing before a headlight, and the postures are now more impractical, tortured, even. He continues his work based on the tradition of a vivid questioning of reality, not in that of acceptance or escape.

Learn more about this author, Damyanti Ghosh.
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