This oil painting consists of two connected canvases featuring a row of identical men dressed like office workers, in white shirts and grey trousers. With eyes closed and with wide grins, they kneel in a long line, each wrapping his arms around the man in front of him. Yue Minjun’s work reflects social changes in China and stems from a profound sense of disillusionment after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Here, the men—self-portraits of the artist—are portrayed like clones bound together, and the sides of the canvases depicting a body and a head suggest that one sees only a fragment of an infinite chain. The uniform characters speak to standardisation, anonymity, and monotony.
Yue gradually developed his signature artistic style of portraiture in the 1990s, moving from portraits of fellow artists towards caricatures of a grinning man. In many of his paintings and sculptures, mechanical smiles appear like masks, suggesting concealment of suffering and unease, an impression that is amplified by unsettling scenes or motifs.
Yue Minjun (born 1962, Daqing) graduated from Heibei Normal University in 1989. He is a major figure of the Cynical Realism movement, known for his iconic ‘laughing man’. This image illustrates the irony and boredom of Chinese society during the rise of consumerism and economic reform in the early 1990s. Yue lives and works in Beijing.