Yue Minjun's First French Retrospective at Fondation Cartier

The Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris hosted the first French retrospective of Yue Minjun, a leading figure of Chinese 'cynical realism,' from November 14, 2012, to March 17, 2013. The exhibition featured paintings, preparatory drawings, and photographs spanning from 1991 to the present. Dominated by his iconic self-portraits with wide grins, closed eyes, and open mouths, the show highlighted the obsessive repetition of this motif, garish colors, grotesque postures, and absurd situations. A key work, 'The Execution' (1995), depicts four laughing effigies of the artist facing a firing squad, with a fifth doppelgänger inviting the viewer into the pictorial field. Yue Minjun's earlier appropriations of Chinese propaganda icons—such as Dong Xiwen's 'The Founding of the Nation' and He Kongde's 'Gutian Conference'—removed Mao, his followers, and the Red Army. His cold copies of revolutionary allegories by David ('The Death of Marat') and Delacroix ('Liberty Leading the People') also eliminated figures and hope. The exhibition's final section, 'Overlappings,' breaks the violent and tense 'mask of laughter' by scraping fresh paint to ruin the representation of the artist's face. Curator Carole Boulbès described Yue Minjun as a disillusioned anti-hero who deconstructs myths of painting and history.