Yue Minjun is one of those artists who, at the turning point of the 1990s, managed to register—like a seismograph—the psychic state of a China brutally shifting from ideological communism to authoritarian capitalism. It is precisely this historical, almost geological position that explains both the power of his visual language and the extreme volatility of his market value. Born in 1962 in Heilongjiang and trained in a country still marked by the Cultural Revolution, he reached artistic maturity at the exact moment when China opened itself to the global market—a moment of collective disorientation in which the old narratives collapsed while no new meaning had yet emerged. It is at this point that his famous laugh appeared: that endlessly repeated grimace, mouth wide open, teeth clenched, eyes narrowed, so often mistaken for jubilation, when it is in fact a mask—a defensive laugh, a survival reflex, almost a social convulsion.
Visually, Yue Minjun is immediately recognizable, which is both a strength and a trap. His multiplied self-portraits—those pink or red figures, often identical—laugh into emptiness, into barren landscapes, absurd settings, or quotations from Western art history, from Delacroix to Goya, as if the contemporary Chinese subject had been thrown into a global museum it does not yet know how to inhabit. This obsessive repetition is a way of saying that the individual has become a commodity, a clone, a sign, in a world where political power and the market overlap. That is precisely what made Yue Minjun so powerful between roughly 1995 and 2005: he gave plastic form to the schizophrenia of an entire society.
What remains profoundly true in Yue Minjun’s work—and what explains why he will not disappear—is that his laughter has become one of the most accurate images of modern Chinese experience: a laugh that does not signify joy, but the impossibility of crying, a social mask in a world where the individual is caught between propaganda, the market, and the loss of reference points. But as a market asset, he must be approached with the same caution one would apply to an over-produced star of the 1980s: one must choose the period, choose rarity, and above all never confuse institutional recognition with real liquidity.
