Untitled

At first glance, Yue Minjun's paintings seem humorous-with their groups of identical pink-skinned figures with grinning faces. Yue's distinctive figure paintings emerged from the Chinese political climate of the 1990s, when the continued challenges of living in communist China caused many citizens to question the possibility of attaining individual rights. Much of the art coming out of China during this period, often called Cynical Realism, is a carefully composed response to the emptiness felt by students, intellectuals, and artists after events culminating in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the imprisonment of many demonstrators. Yue Minjun's paintings epitomize these attitudes. Although some critics have referenced the laughing Buddha as a source for these works, upon closer scrutiny their smiling faces begin to look more like grimaces that express a mixture of vulnerability, pain, or indifference.