Biography Index As Mad As You Pi Li The figures in Yue Minjun's works are always stuck in extreme emotional conditions, and appear to have lost their rational judgement. They are rendered as beings who are either dull-headed or short of a full complement of wits. These works suggest an age-old motive in art history, that is, the theme of "fool" in the Flemish School. During the Renaissance, lunatics and fools were no longer regarded as people in touch with God as in the Medieval Age, but taken as those possessed by demons or deprived of reason. The way to deal with this sort of people was to secure them on boats given a small store of food and banished from the cities as the boat was left to run its own course. The subject of the "fool" was a perpetual theme portrayed by Flemish painters, especially Bosch and Bruegel. In this way, they satirized the ignorance and stupidity of the church, and referenced the control of religion over the people. In their view, various vulgar and evil customs or practices of mankind could be found in those lunatics, which then served as a metaphor for reality. Similar to the Flemish painters of the Renaissance period, Yue Minjun's painting is the art of provoking laughter. Just as in our era, his pictures often show clearly the power carried by so-called "superficiality". The humorous aura he creates is so appealing that we frequently overlook the profound meaning behind the paintings themselves. When roughly generalizing his paintings, people tend to place emphasis on the fact that his work often takes the self as its object and offers a mockery of ego. Actually, to thoughtful people, the characters in his paintings are not only the artist himself, but also us. Yue Minjun's art has the power to penetrate directly the human heart. This power stems from the "abandonment" of the self. Yue Minjun used the word "abandonment" when he described his earliest works in the early 1990s. This word very much embodies the features of that period. In the 1980s, a group of artists regarded their creation as a means to save and reform society. But the course of history shattered those artists' dream. Yet in the 1990s, a new species of artists emerged, and Yue Minjun was among them. The social situation since reform and opening-up has led these artists to discover that although previous artists had endeavored very hard for almost ten years, yet within society, there still existed an overwhelming counter-force. As an artist, it is not possible in fact for an artist to realize their creative intuition. Thus, the sentiments of cynicism and misanthropy began to pervade the art world. Yue Minjun and his counterparts employ plain, boring and absurd scenes from life to ridicule society. Those with a discerning eye will see that beneath his jokes and abandonment there actually lies a more profound conviction. Differing from previous artists, in the work of Yue Minjun this belief arises in the form of "irony". The basic logic in his art uses "vogue", "coarse" and "meaninglessness" as a counterpoint to "nobility" and "meaning" in the ruling social discourse, and tries to restore the dignity desired of by the self. Against this background, Yue Minjun situates himself in a double-battled state: on one hand, there is doubt about and a questioning of reality; and on the other hand, a questioning of the entire pattern and creative methodology of China's contemporary art since the 1980s. However, unfortunately, since the 1990s, the real changes in the international, political and cultural layout have invisibly covered up the internal meaning of art, while those changes confer all kinds of blessings upon the arts. Yue Minjun's art is frequently and narrowly understood as an attitude toward reality. What is neglected is the severing of the relationship between the old-style methods of creation and his own. Only when we recognise the break-throughs in these methods can we understand the achievement Yue Minjun has made as an artist. In Yue Minjun's art, he thoroughly eliminates traditional aesthetic conceptions, such as grace, sublimity, tangibility and poetic quality. This is actually the essential meaning of his "abandonment". The biggest difference between other contemporary artists and Yue Minjun is that while other artists make the boring moments "sublime" and "poetic", he resolutely employs a mode of degradation and adulteration of the concepts of "sublime" and "poetic". This difference is subtle, yet significant in effect. His rewriting and degradation include cheerful scenes, significant historical moments and profound classical art. And this sort of degradation and adaptation is particularly critical to China's contemporary art, because what Yue Minjun has established, in this process, is not a style but an artistic realms closely bound to contemporary life. With the passage of time, the content of so-called "social reality" in China today differs greatly from the artistic reality of the early 1990s. At present, the clashes between diverse ideologies and values are not as acute as in the past, but they have not yet vanished completely from our sight, being only temporarily concealed by the booming commercial economy. In this complicated reality, everything can be betrayed, or ceded, even "spirituality" in art. Entering into the cycle of globalization, China like any place in the world is driven constantly by a desire for "novelty". Under the motivation of this desire, people need to forget rapidly the old idols while at the same time continuously create new ones. Following this, "newness" or "contemporary" have become the greatest idol of this era. The culture characteristic of this epoch is the process of unceasingly creating idols. Within this context, while degrading and rewriting, Yue Minjun achieves the goal of anti-idolization through constant "repetition". He has said, "Using traditional modes of painting and sculpturing to unendingly clone the self-image is for the purpose of creating a new idol just like contemporary television and film modes. When an idol is constantly repeated, because of the increase in quantity, it acquires tremendous power. Once an idol is created, I can utilize and apply my idol, using it continuously. Idols have life. They frequently influence our life, standardize our manners and behavior. Today's society is a society of idols. Today's culture is the culture of idols." Perhaps, against this background, Yue Minjun borrows the form of "The Terracotta Warriors and Horses" from the Qin Dynasty, infinitely duplicating the image of his own self. As he used "worthlessness" as a counterpoint to "value" before, today, he has begun to use "non-creation" to negate "creation". Because even within the contemporary artistic realm, the creation driven by commercial benefits has become a kind of new idol and is applied in sales and exhibition, which has won great commercial benefit. If the movement of times raises doubts about Yue Minjun's art losing its critical nature to reality, then similarly the evolution affecting this age clearly bespeaks of his critical power on art and art history. These two aspects actually penetrate all his works. The former critical nature is achieved through the images in his works, and the latter is realized through the alterations in his methodology. This is a kind of attitude and way to face reality for an artist, a kind of artistic way, and even a way of living. Wang Shuo, a renowned author who is a contemporary of Yue Minjun, in a detail of his Wan Zhu depicts a prim and sanctimonious writer who says to a young literary girl that the most important thing in literary creation is that "one should be willing to part with oneself". I don't know whether Yue Minjun has read this novel, but I believe that he would certainly appreciate the detail mentioned here. Because what he does in his work is like an ignorant and innocent girl who gives up her self, that is not only the image of oneself, but also the obligation of oneself as an artist. And once really these are given up, he will be as Marx pronounced in his Communism Manifesto: "What is lost is only chains, but what is won is the whole world." Biography