YUE MINJUN - Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain - Cartier

FINE ARTS
Yue Minjun,
L’Ombre du fou rire
Fondation Cartier pour l’art
contemporain, Paris
Bilingual French / English
Hardback, 23 x 28.4 cm,
276 pages, 130 black-and-white
and color reproductions
Texts by Ouyang Jianghe
and François Jullien
Interview with Yue Minjun
ISBN UK: 978-2-86925-099-4
Price: £30
ISBN US: 978-0-500-97048-5
Price: $45 (CAN. $47.50)
Publication date: November 2012
Distribution: Thames & Hudson
261, boulevard Raspail, 75014 Paris
Tél. 01 42 18 56 50 / Fax 01 42 18 56 52
Nov. 14, 2012 › March 17, 2013
YUE MINJUN
L’OMBRE DU FOU RIRE
From November 14, 2012 to March 17, 2013 the Fondation Cartier pour l’art
contemporain will present a major retrospective devoted to the work of the Chinese
painter Yue Minjun. The first monographic show of this magnitude ever to be
exhibited in Europe, it will bring together the artist’s most iconic paintings as well
as more than one hundred drawings.
Born in 1962 in the city of Daqing in Heilongjiang Province in China, Yue Minjun
is an icon of contemporary Chinese painting. Considered one of the protagonists
of “Cynical Realism,” an art movement that emerged after the student demonstrations
in Tiananmen Square in 1989, he began developing his own distinctive
iconography in the 1990s, which combines pictorial references with historical
references.
Yue Minjun’s paintings are immediately recognizable: they are painted in bright
colors on large canvases and peopled almost exclusively by laughing male figures,
all which are self-portraits presented either as a single figure or replicated over and
over again to form a battalion of grinning frozen-faced clones. These figures appear
in grotesque poses or in mock execution scenes, creating an atmosphere of tension
that oscillates between the lighthearted and the outrageous, the mundane and the
excessive, offering an often implicit satire of contemporary Chinese society.
Another major feature of Yue Minjun’s paintings is the fact that they are often
inspired by masterpieces of Western art or modern Chinese painting. He either
reinterprets the painting or else strictly reproduces the setting of the original piece,
but leaves out all of the characters. These works, expressed in the form of series
that seem to border on the obsessive, enable the artist to reveal his admiration for
the paintings of great artists while, at the same time, playing the iconoclast.
Moving back and forth between homage and irony, Yue Minjun takes an audacious
look both at the world of images and at contemporary society. His participation
in the Venice Biennale in 1999 brought him worldwide fame and opened the
doors of the international art market to him. Today, Yue Minjun is considered one
of the most influential artists of his generation.
The catalog for this exhibition will illuminate the work of Yue Minjun by taking
an in-depth look at the idiosyncratic iconography he has developed over the past
twenty years. Significant contributions by the Chinese critic and poet Ouyang
Jianghe and the French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien as well as an
interview with Yue Minjun will enable readers to approach his artwork from new
perspectives and to explore the many references to art history and Chinese history
which are the sources of his work.

Memory - 2, 2000
Big Swans, 2003
Bystander, 2011
The Execution, 1995-1996

The Sun, 2000
On the Rostrum of Tianamnen, 1992
Freedom Leading People, 1995-1996
Untitled, 1994

L’ARTISTE ET SON AMI
ARTIST AND HIS FRIENDS
|
1992
Huile sur toile
Oil on canevas
190 x 220 cm
206
L’ARTISTE ET SON AMI
ARTIST AND HIS FRIENDS
|
1992
Huile sur toile
Oil on canevas
190 x 220 cm
216