Yue Min-Jun (born 1962, Daqing, China) is one of the leading Chinese artists. He is best known for oil paintings depicting formations of his laughing self-portraits in various settings. His iconography is easily recognisable, it challenges social and cultural conventions by depicting objects and political issues in a radical, abstract, ironic and cynical manner.
Yue Min-Jun initially started painting as a hobby, subsequently he graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Hebei Normal University, China in 1985. In the 90s he joined an artist community in Yuan Ming Yuan, a village near Beijing where he began to form his style and iconography. The paintings, sculptures, and installations of Yue Minjun feature uniform laughing pink faces, which appear to be self-portraits. Through various symbols, metaphors, signs, or through depictions of daily life the artist constructs various realities against which the laughing figures are rendered. Yue became famous after his participation in the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, which granted him access to international art. One of the best-known paintings by Yue Minjun and an icon for modern Chinese art and the Cynical Realism movement is Execution. It was painted in 1995 and is generally regarded as a reaction to the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989, as it shows several laughing men in front of an execution squad. The cloned all smiling Minjun self-portraits have become known in the art world as the "Silly Man". As the preparation for his paintings, the artist uses photographs of himself being photographed in various poses. This approach reflects the self-irony of the artist. Yue Minjun is often classified as part of the Chinese "Cynical Realist" movement, however, the artist does not support such attribution. Nevertheless, Yue often challenges social and cultural conventions by depicting objects and political issues in a radical, abstract, ironic and cynical manner.

Yue Minjun

In fantastical paintings populated with heightened, hysterical self-portraits, Yue Minjun satirizes contemporary society and art historical tropes.

Backyard Garden belongs to the set of twenty lithographs from the “Snatched Ecstasy of Yue Minjun”, which comes as a limited edition of 130 rare books. The work of Yue Minjun is instantly recognizable with its uniform laughing faces, the artist's faces. Minjun creates various realities against which the laughing figures are rendered, thus creating ambiguous images, often with the sinister atmosphere, which comes as his personal cynical reaction to various social and political dimensions of contemporary Chinese realities.

Immediately humorous and sympathetic, Yue Minjun’s paintings offer a light-hearted approach to philosophical enquiry and contemplation of existence. Yue’s self-portraits have been describe by theorist Li Xianting as “a self-ironic response to the spiritual vacuum and folly of modern-day China”, thus the acidic tones and commercialized vacuity of his works are used to underscore the insincerity of his figures’ mirth.

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“ Art should be an expression of one's particular feelings and should be direct and deep. So I drew one person, and then added another and another until there were crowds of them. Then I felt my emotions to be fully expressed. „

—Yue Minjun