Yue Minjun (Chinese, b. 1962) paints brightly coloured self-portraits of himself grinning or laughing hysterically, drawing on Pop Art and Surrealism as well as on motifs from Chinese and Western art history.,Critics have grouped the work under the label Cynical Realism, alongside artists such as Fang Lijun and Liu Wei, though Yue has disputed the label.Born in Daqing City, he lives and works in Beijing.,
After finishing high school in 1983, Yue worked as an electrician and then spent five years on an oil rig off Tianjin, painting portraits of his co-workers. In 1990 he moved to the Yuanmingyuan artist village and began the series of grinning self-portraits he is known for.His early painting Gweong Gweong, 1993, overlays the site of the Tiananmen Square crackdown with fighter jets and grinning figures. It sold for $6.9 million at Christie's in 2008, a year after Yue appeared on the cover of Time magazine.
Massacre of Chios was purchased for $4 million at Sotheby's Hong Kong in 2007, and Execution sold for $3.7 million at Sotheby's London the same year.His work entered the collections of the Denver Art Museum, the Shenzhen Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.,In 2008 he collaborated with the artist KAWS on a series of figurines that blended their two styles.
In 2022 Yue's solo exhibition “Smile at the Flower Sermon” at Tang Contemporary Art in Hong Kong introduced floral motifs that conceal his subjects' faces, as in Hibiscus Moscheutos, 2021, and Lilium, 2021. He described the grinning figures in his paintings as a way of concealing pain: “My work is to do with the fundamental agony of being human and the sense of confusion that comes with living in our society”.Chinese nationalist commentators accused Yue of “humiliating the military” over military imagery in works including Armed Forces – Planche No. 17, 2007, and images of his work were censored on Chinese social media platforms including Weibo.In 2026 Tang Contemporary Art in Hong Kong presented Yue's solo exhibition “Crabs”, surveying three decades of his practice.
