Yue Minjun
Paints the same laughing man over and over, and the laugh is not a happy one.
Yue Minjun was born in Heilongjiang province in 1962, worked on an offshore oil rig, and settled in the artists' village at Yuanmingyuan outside Beijing at the start of the 1990s. He is grouped with Cynical Realism, the generation that responded to the aftermath of 1989 with irony rather than protest. The paintings repeat a single figure — a version of himself, pink-skinned, eyes squeezed shut, mouth open in a fixed and slightly desperate laugh — multiplied across canvases that quote Chinese propaganda posters and Western art history alike. The laugh is generally read as a mask rather than an expression.
Oils on canvas are the core market and it is principally in Hong Kong and mainland China. The imagery is highly repetitive by design, which makes accurate identification of a specific painting dependent on the title, dimensions and date rather than the composition, and also makes the name an easy target for copies. Sculpture in painted bronze and fibreglass exists in numbered editions, as do screenprints and lithographs, all of which trade separately. Signature, in pinyin and Chinese characters, is usually on the face with a date.
If you own a work by Yue Minjun
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.