Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Yue Minjun has succeeded where so many others have failed. He has invented a pictorial language that speaks directly to the gut of our time, without ever falling into pathos or self-indulgence. This painter, born in 1962 in Daqing, Heilongjiang province, has forged one of the most recognizable faces in global contemporary art, that gaping, pink, and predatory smile that has haunted our retinas for three decades.
The epiphany of forced laughter
The story begins in 1989, when Yue Minjun discovered a work by Geng Jianyi titled The Second Situation, depicting four laughing faces arranged in a series. This revelation would forever transform his artistic practice. But where others might have simply borrowed the motif, Yue Minjun sublimated it, turned it around, and made it a weapon of mass destruction of all our aesthetic and political certainties.
His laughter is anything but joyful. It is a grimace of survival, a expression of helplessness in the face of the absurdity of the modern world. When we look at his canvases like Execution (1995), which reinterprets both Manet and Goya by placing his sneering doubles in front of the red wall of Tiananmen, we immediately understand that we are not dealing with caricature, but with something much more disturbing: the raw truth of a generation caught between the promises of communism and the realities of nascent capitalism.
To fully grasp the extent of Yue Minjun’s work, we must invoke Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, developed in his analysis of François Rabelais’ work [1]. The Russian theorist describes the carnival as a moment of temporary inversion of hierarchies, where “the principle of laughter and the carnivalesque sensory perception of the world which are the basis of grotesque destroy the one-sided seriousness and all pretensions to an unconditional meaning located outside time.”.
This definition exactly matches what Yue Minjun accomplishes in his paintings. His carnivalesque laughter functions according to Bakhtin’s three categories: rites and spectacles (his theatrical stagings), verbal comedy (transposed here into pictorial language) and familiar or even coarse vocabulary (his deliberately vulgar aesthetic, which he claims without complex). Like the medieval carnival, Yue Minjun’s art operates a radical reversal: the powerful become ridiculous, authority turns into buffoonery, and the official order wavers under the assaults of laughter.
Look at his Hats series: each headdress symbolizes a profession, a social rank, an imposed identity. But the face that wears them remains identical, sneering, indifferent to hierarchical distinctions. It is pure Bakhtin applied to post-Maoist China. Yue Minjun’s carnival does not last a few days a year, it settles permanently in our consciousness. His ambivalent laughter, both joyful and sarcastic, liberating and desperate, perfectly embodies this “joyful relativity” that Bakhtin identified as the essence of the grotesque carnivalesque.
Furthermore, Yue Minjun pushes the carnivalesque logic to its paroxysm by representing himself in all situations. He becomes alternately a peasant and an emperor, a victim and an executioner, a spectator and an actor. This infinite multiplication of his own face is part of Bakhtinian ‘grotesque realism,’ where ‘the mass’ (here the repetition of the same character) takes precedence over the individual, and where ‘degradation’ materializes abstract concepts to make them accessible to the common people. Yue Minjun democratizes art by democratizing himself: he is no longer the unique and singular artist, but the ordinary man multiplied to infinity, the universal avatar of our contemporary condition.
The genius of Yue Minjun lies in his ability to actualize Bakhtin’s carnivalesque without falling into imitation. His laughter is not nostalgic for a bygone past; it diagnoses the present with surgical acuity. When he paints his self-portraits floating in cosmic space or contorting in martial arts positions, he shows us that today’s carnival no longer needs fixed dates: it has become our permanent condition, our way of surviving in a world where all values have been relativized.
The terracotta warriors: Eternity diverted
The other key to reading Yue Minjun’s work lies in its permanent dialogue with Chinese history, particularly embodied by his Contemporary Terracotta Warriors (1999-2005). These twenty-five identical bronze sculptures explicitly reference the funerary army of Emperor Qin Shi Huang discovered in 1974 near Xi’an [2]. But where the IIIrd century BC originals each had individualized features, testifying to the sculptural art of the time, Yue Minjun imposes the absolute uniformity of the same laughing face.
This appropriation is not coincidental. The terracotta army of Qin Shi Huang embodied imperial power, the will to immortality of the first unifier of China. These eight thousand soldiers, horses, and chariots were to protect the emperor in the afterlife, extend his reign into eternity. Yue Minjun completely diverts this ambition: his contemporary warriors protect nothing, serve no one, merely sneer at the vanity of all powers.
The contrast is striking: while the original warriors stood in the shadow of the imperial mausoleum, the ultimate expression of Chinese grandeur, those of Yue Minjun are scattered in contemporary sculpture gardens, decorative art objects for bourgeois collectors. This spatial migration says everything about our era: art has moved from the sacred to the commercial, from the political to the aesthetic. But Yue Minjun does not mourn this transformation; he documents it with the cruel objectivity of a chronicler.
His bronze warriors perfectly embody the condition of the contemporary Chinese artist: heirs to a millennial tradition, they must navigate between the expectations of the international market and the constraints of the local political system. Their perpetual laughter then becomes a survival strategy, the only possible posture in the face of the impossibility of saying things directly. This is what Yue Minjun himself explains: ‘I am not mocking anyone else, because once you mock others, you have problems.’
The irony goes even further. Qin Shi Huang had unified China by imposing everywhere ‘a single system of writing, currency, weights and measures,’ according to the UNESCO inscription describing his mausoléum [2]. Yue Minjun achieves in his own way a new unification: that of humanity under the sign of forced laughter. His warriors speak no particular language, belong to no specific nation. They are the soldiers of a universal army: that of ordinary people confronted with the absurdity of the modern world.
This universalization of the Chinese particular explains the international success of Yue Minjun. His laughing warriors speak just as well to Americans as to Europeans, because they embody this postmodern condition where everyone must wear a social mask to survive. By transforming the most sophisticated funerary art in Chinese history into an ironic commentary on our time, Yue Minjun accomplishes a tour de force: he makes archaeology an avant-garde art.
The smile industry
Since his beginnings in the Yuanmingyuan artists’ village in the early 1990s, Yue Minjun has seen his work evolve from the status of a marginal experiment to that of a market phenomenon. When Execution sold for 5.9 million dollars at Sotheby’s in 2007, setting a record for Chinese contemporary art, something definitely changed in the reception of his work.
This commercial success raises unsettling questions. How can an art born of marginality and protest become so perfectly integrated into the system it claimed to criticize? Yue Minjun himself sometimes seems disoriented by this transformation: “What was important to me was the creation part of the painting. But it seems that something has changed. Perhaps it is the way money becomes more important in society”.
Yet this evolution does not disqualify his work, it enriches it with an additional dimension. Yue Minjun’s laughter now works on several levels: it still mocks Chinese society and its contradictions, but it also ridicules the Western art world that has adopted and co-opted him. His laughing warriors now adorn the living rooms of wealthy collectors, the ultimate irony for works born of consumerism critique.
Was this co-optation predictable? Undoubtedly. But Yue Minjun had anticipated the trap by multiplying his self-portraits to infinity. How do you co-opt an artist who has already organized his own industrial reproduction? How do you domesticate a creator who has made standardization his language? By transforming himself into a consumer product, Yue Minjun has escaped classic co-optation. He can no longer be co-opted since he has already co-opted himself.
Chinese melancholy
Behind the perpetual laughter hides a deep melancholy, that of a generation that has experienced the collapse of all the great narratives. Born in 1962, Yue Minjun belongs to that cohort of artists who grew up under Mao, studied during Deng Xiaoping’s opening, and created after Tiananmen. Their youth was built on revolutionary promises that turned into capitalist disillusions.
This melancholy is particularly evident in his recent works, such as the Flowers series developed during the pandemic. Here, the laughing faces disappear behind luxuriant corollas, as if the artist finally sought to hide that laughter he has been imposing on us for thirty years. “The flowers represent passive obstructions”, he explains, “they prevent us from seeing individual truths beyond status, gender and personality markers”. This new series may mark a major evolution: the shift from explicit laughter to more subtle concealment.
But even in this desire to hide, Yue Minjun remains true to himself. For what is a flower, if not another type of smile? A vegetal smile, offered to the world to seduce and reproduce? By replacing his grimaces with petals, the artist only sophisticates his basic metaphor: we are all forced to smile, whether it be with our mouths or with our disguises.
The legacy of sneering
What will remain of Yue Minjun in fifty years? Probably the most radical aspect of his work: this ability to transform art into social diagnostics, to make portraits an instrument for measuring the era. His laughter will have been the thermometer of contemporary China, and by extension, of the globalized world in which we all evolve.
For Yue Minjun has never done anything but hold up a mirror to us. His multiple self-portraits reflect our own condition: that of individuals forced to smile constantly, whether it’s on social networks, in professional meetings, or in front of surveillance cameras. His genius was to understand before anyone else that the smile had become our gilded prison, our modern way of wearing a mask.
In this sense, Yue Minjun far exceeds the framework of contemporary Chinese art. He becomes a chronicler of the postmodern human condition, the one who knew how to capture the essence of our era in a few strokes of pink and white brushwork. His laughter will not fade, because it has become our own. And as long as we have to smile to survive, Yue Minjun’s self-portraits will continue to haunt us with their ruthless truth.
- Mikhail Bakhtin, L’oeuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance, Paris, Gallimard, Tel, 1970
- UNESCO, “Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor”, World Heritage Centre, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/441/
