Born in 1962 in Daqing, China, Yue Minjun lives and works in Beijing. An iconic figure in contemporary art, he is the best known member of China’s cynical realism movement. He made his name with monumental works whose central theme is an examination of laughter in all its senses, enabling him to ‘mask his powerlessness’ and to caricature the uniformity of Chinese society. Yue Minjun’s paintings are ambiguous, the smiles of their open-faced subjects somehow unsettling.

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