On October 6th 2002, Li Xianting and Yue Minjun discussed details of the development of Yue Minjun's works and thoughts.

I

Li: In which year did you begin to draw people foolishly laughing, without any personality, lying around? They make me feel dizzy.
Yue: In 1993, in Yuanmingyuan (a small village near the old Summer Palace, which became home to an artists' colony. Ed.). Looking back, I think it must have been connected with the cultural environment of my childhood when the education I received was without variation across China. I lived in a compound where all the families belonged to the same work unit. I had little access to the outside world. I knew little about what was happening externally. All I knew was what others told me, such as what ideals I should uphold and whom I should follow. I had a fixed model for my conduct.
At that time, I thought that life was normal and hopeful. After graduating from middle school I got a job. The work unit was small and somewhat isolated but there were still many people "plotting" against each other. For example, the relationships between the directors themselves, between the directors and the workers, and even between the workers were delicate and highly complicated. It occurred to me that relations between people were far different from what I had experienced at school, and it infused me with skepticism.
In 1985, I went to college hoping to make a contribution to my country after graduation. I had a great passion for learning. However as society changed, all these bubbles were gradually burst. In 1989, just as I was about to graduate, the June Fourth Incident occurred. It knocked me for six and saw me lose my idealism. Even though the ideals I held was not very strong, I still felt I had been cheated. I became dissatisfied with society.
At that time, a number of artists had started creating works about this sense of loss, which inspired me in some way. I began to work on images of people that simultaneously aroused feelings of strength and self-mockery, which fit with my mood then and helped to relieve the unhappiness in my heart. Before I produced these people, I felt my art lacked power. 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.

Li: At what point did you stop drawing rows and rows of figures and start drawing yourself?
Yue: In the same year. At first I drew only several versions of myself. The prime reason was merely technical and not that complicated; meaning that I didn't need to find a model, though we were told at college any creation must have a model. What I was doing seemed to contradict other approaches. After all, all I need is myself. It is easier to control and more convenient in creation.

Li: So, initially you were not intending to mock yourself, were you?
Yue: No, but I was deriding society which nobody else was doing. I happened to have such a feeling, which grew increasingly intense until I arrived at my own style or concept. I have discussed this with many people, and they do not find society laughable in any way. These people are absolutely normal. Of course, some agree there are things wrong with society, and which are also unpleasant.

Li: Besides the ridicule, there are a number of eccentric actions.
Yue: Right, but they are just something funny from daily life, and I think they serve to enrich my mind. Actually, the poses were originally aimed at mimicking recognisable Chinese stances, such as those awarded revolutionary characters. We had hieroglyphs in ancient times where a specific pose served to indicate a particular character. Yet however I posed, I didn't look like a (written) character. For example, the "华" in "中华" (China) can not be represented by the form of a single person. So, finally I resorted to a group of postures.
Once a foreigner asked me, "your figures originate from Chinese characters, don't they?" I was surprised. He could even recognize the particular characters among the various poses. I thought it was because he had no idea about how to write Chinese characters. If you know the characters well you will not necessarily associate the poses with them. I had intended to use one pose to represent a poem or a Chinese character but it was impossible, thus these poses, these eccentric poses, came into being.

Li: In Fang Lijun's painting, there is a kind of intense internal antagonism and force. A bald headed figure or a group of bald headed figures effects a visual clout, fully demonstrating the power of the image. Compared with Fang Lijun's work, the foolish laugh you create delivers a sense of idleness, laziness and boredom.
Yue: Fang Lijun's drawing is indeed internal. He has a peculiar inner depression while my characters are always beaming, which is undoubtedly a manifestation of an "extrovert" rather than an "introvert" element. He laughs and jokes without the least atom of seriousness which, to viewers, makes him seem extremely unusual.

Li: It is a sense of loafing around and being indifferent to everything.
Yue: Yes. Caring for nothing. And seeing everything as so-so. I was like that. And it proved a way of life at the time.
After graduation from college I got a job teaching drawing for North China Petroleum but I left to move to Yuanmingyuan. My parents urged me to return to work, but I loved drawing and had totally lost interest in teaching. I had nothing to teach. Let me draw all my life, no matter how poor I might end up. I just wanted to do what I liked doing, and I didn't think too much more about it. Probably carelessness is a trait of my character and I don't live as my family or society expects of me. That also might be the reason why my works emit a sense of laxity. I never study carefully the composition of my picture - whether it is wider on this side or the other side lacks something. I don't care about the proportion at all. I don't even produce preliminary sketches. Once I make a decision I never make any changes to the painting. That's just my personality.

Li: Have any experiences in your personal life had any influence on your pictures?
Yue: Nothing has ever had any strong impact on a slipshod person like me. Unlike some people who come to their senses suddenly as if struck by lightening, I have never experienced such a moment. I must have been influenced by something but nothing that made a memorable impression.

Li: There is nothing special in your life, or, let's say, nothing makes a strong impact on your mind. But it is just this feeling of life that influences your creation in the most important way, that is, your works do not pay homage to any so-called major themes, sublime or profound. They focus on the superficial. I think your works are the embodiment of superficiality.

II

Li: You must have had experience producing commercial advertisements, no? It seems you complete a painting at two sittings.
Yue: That's true. First I block in the color. At the second round I complete the details. I don't mind whether a picture is good or bad. Bad things have their proper reason for existence. The bad things for an artist are his shortcomings, but those shortcomings just might be his characteristics. If you change them, it will become something else. So I keep some flaws. Let the flaws be.

Li: I assume you are simplifying the former approaches to Soviet Socialist Realism to the maximum degree. After all, the Soviets were only simplifying classical European realism China's art education system is inherited from 契斯恰科夫 of the former Soviet Union and several generations of Chinese oil painters followed this strictly from the 1950s to the 1970s. Later when I saw original paintings of European realism, I could not find a trace of painterly division (the structuring process) at all. The compositions were concrete and delicate. Planar perspective or structure not a mode of simplification, but in the interpretation of forms, also leads to problematic conceptual issues.
As soon as the Cultural Revolution ended, Chen Danqing's anti-Soviet approaches emerged seeking to return to the origin of European realism. These exerted great influence on art circles in China. You might be unconsciously using Chen Danqing's methods, or perhaps you didn't learn well enough from the Soviets. You scored a lucky hit and established your own style. The connotations in your works are directly demonstrated through the irony in technique and the simplicity of the modeling.
Yue: I suppose so. In the beginning, I applied Soviet methods of observing life, like the chiaroscuro they adopted from Renaissance painting. Eventually, I totally discarded such techniques because I hate putting in more strokes after having sketched out the composition. It's boring. I prefer simplicity. A sea of strokes makes me uncomfortable.

Li: That's the point - you prefer simplicity. This helps perfect your art. And your smartness brings the simplicity into appropriate play. Ironically, as simplicity echoes superficiality, the present superficial era furnishes your success with opportunities. It has given you some lucky breaks. All successful artists are lucky.
Yue: Superficial, without careful consideration or process and polish, looking uncomplicated, it must be concerned with my relaxed personality and a little careful thinking.

Li: How long does it take you to finish a work, say, a two-meter one?
Yue: If I work four hours a day, I can make one in ten days. Now it may be even faster because in the past I used to include architectural elements or other objects in the background. But now this is increasingly simplified.

Li: Did you ever attend a Cultural Palace or have experience of producing advertising images?
Yue: Never. But we used to have the labor union where gouache pictures and prints were produced to illustrate certain ideas. For example, when a thief was caught, we would translate the whole story into a series of pictures.

Li: You apply the drawing methods of mass media to your present works. Your pictures remind me of the posters I saw in my school years. Several strokes produce a face.
Yue: That's it. I can never draw as many times like the teachers and students in art colleges. I don't know why. Maybe I just don't have that ability. I was in Hebei Normal University; most teachers there graduated from Tianjin Art College and probably belong to the Soviet school of academics. The pencil in their hands went high and low on the canvas. I might have been affected by that.

Li: But you endowed what you learned with a sense of humor.
Yue: I never had the chance to see any original art works from the West, but from my childhood, I saw many New Year pictures. In truth, I don't understand western classical paintings with their dark somber backgrounds. Why those colours? I don't like them at all. They are very unnatural, unlike what we see in real life. So, psychologically I was resistant to it, whereas paintings of Impressionism are brighter and more comfortable, showering me with sunlight.

Li: You rarely use subtle shading in colour, do you, preferring to rely on complementary colours to provide a sense of form. Furthermore, it seems you rely on the addition of black and white pigment to suggest shadow and light.
Yue: Right.

Li: Black, white and gray? Just like chromatic printing?
Yue: Exactly.

Li: Is the flesh color in the face also toned with only by the addition of black and white?
Yue: Yes. I learnt human figure drawing as a combination of brightness and darkness when I was very young. The first thing that comes to my mind when I decide to draw is which part should be light and which should be dark. Then I paint - red plus black achieves the dark parts; the bright ones are red plus white. It's simple. I gradually found its advantages. Where for each painting I use my own almost unvarying image as the sole mode of expression, eventually this is transformed into another thing, namely, a so-called symbol. The symbol itself may interest an artist, and become closer to being an idol. Then I think of silk-screen printing of which the edition number may be huge. That is a very good method. The silk-screen process achieves purer tones of colour. In my oil paintings I still felt a need to create a gradual transition of one tone into another. These "transition" tones are now drastically reduced.

Li: When did you start to produce silk-screen prints?
Yue: In 1999. I happened to visit the Venice Biennale. I had a strong feeling that many works rely on repetition and how they occupy space to produce a visual force. A single work never achieves such power. Media, information and other aspects of mass culture thrive on constant repetition. After I came back to China, I realized that the figures I had drawn before all seemed clumsy and stupid. How to make them more interesting? I turned to sculpture.
The figures of the "terracotta army" immediately sprang to mind - such a great number. I remembered records of them in books revealing a wide variety of postures and expressions, all different from each other, though in my eyes they were all the same. A sea of black. Anyway, I had planned to make at least a thousand figures. In the event, I gave up at 25 out of an intended first group of a hundred. That would have been too many. I decided to make only 25. I had no room to place more. I had to control the number.
Of course in a proper space, I imagined this repetition would produce a strong visual power. I felt it was like Lei Feng or Marilyn Monroe who were not known to people at first but became known as society needed them. But even though their names become popular, everyday life is no longer informed (or its ideals led) by them. There is a very big problem now; unlike at other eras, China no longer produces idols. No sooner has a commercial idol emerged than it fades away. A famous singer may not be able to hold onto their fans. The same is true of politicians.

Li: The rhythm of this era is accelerating and idols are becoming more and more superficial. Here, I've thought of a title: Let's call it Superficial Idol. You make superficial idols. It's not that you're in a hurry to be on television, but you're obviously keen for people to know your face. You constantly depict yourself with your trademark foolish laugh and eccentric actions, as an "idol" which unconsciously reveals the sense of change, instability and unpredictability of the present age.
Yue: I don't think that there is such rapid change in the West. I suppose western idols remain for dozens of years.

Li: Well, perhaps the Monroe era has passed.
Yue: But people still regard her as the embodiment of sexiness. Lei Feng died long ago and those who do good deeds are still praised as Lei Feng. This is also a symbol.

III
Li: You have also made two other types of paintings. One series sees you altering well known compositions, substituting the figures with your own self-image.
Yue: Yes. I have altered five altogether, namely, Capturing Luding Bridge, Founding Ceremony of China, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, Monet's Dejeurner Sur 'lHerbe and Vermeer's The Lacemaker.

Li: Did you paint them yourself or have them painted? I guess you had them painted. When I interviewed Jeff Koons in New York I saw him instructing several people to paint. This is a fashionable way and a conceptual need as well, just like your alteration of famous paintings. As far as painting techniques are concerned, is having them done better than doing them yourself?
Yue: Yes, I have other people paint them. I have the ideas and then find someone else to paint them. There was a period of time during which I felt uncomfortable with this, for example, the fact that it was easy for others to grasp my simple technique when I was not capable of anything more complex myself.

Li: How did you make your choice of famous compositions?
Yue: It began with a small idea. At first I thought an artist always added things to a canvas but didn't remove anything. But nothing can be removed from a blank canvas, so my idea couldn't be realized on an empty canvas. But, if a part of a picture that is familiar to everyone is changed, it produces a special feeling - you establish a contrast. And force viewers to think about the figures.

Li: This is similar to Minimalism but you begin your deduction on the basis of realism. When did you first paint in this way?
Yue: In late 1998. The first picture was the Founding Ceremony of China, which for me was the most famous painting I could think of.

Li: I like it. It is one of your few conceptual works. I knew the original Founding Ceremony of China from my childhood. You adopt the approach of "ironic imitation" prevalent in the field of photography in the work of artists like Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall, and a language of altering famous paintings. Dong Xiwen's Founding Ceremony of China is an extremely famous painting in China. It depicts the event of Mao Zedong and other Communist Party leaders declaring the founding of the People's Republic of China. This painting is the earliest and most representative work of Mao Zedong's proscribed art style (Revolutionary Realism Ed.). Mao stuck to the principle that art should serve politics and be enjoyed by workers, peasants and soldiers. He called on artists to learn from the folk art of peasants. Dong Xiwen's Founding Ceremony of China is a model of this type, that is, it is famous for its style - in being an oil painting composed like a New Year pictures - and the constant revision of the Communist Party leaders it was originally intended to depict.
The original painting was completed between 1951 and 1952. As Gao Gang, secretary of the Northeast Bureau of the Communist Party was ousted in a political campaign, he was painted out of the painting. In the Cultural Revolution, when Liu Shaoqi, the second most powerful man in the Chinese Communist Party was dethroned, Dong Biwu took his position in the painting. The humor and profoundity that exists in your work is that you made another revision, imitating the whole atmosphere of the grand ceremony but removing out all the characters. While amusing the audience, the painting may set us into a deep thought - the Tiananmen gate tower remains there, empty.
Yue: When I started work on the series of "altered" famous paintings, I had thought to replace the characters with acquaintances but that would have proved too difficult. I then thought of the June Fourth Incident. I felt the democratic fighters were rather stupid. They had no practical theories or direction. Only an outpouring of emotion. This led me to Delacroix's Liberty Leading Her People.

Li: What are these pictures with the multitude of circles over the surface?
Yue: I began work on a few of these works in 1996. I always wanted them to be more forceful but producing so many strokes requires a supreme effort. I had thought to make the paint very thick and used a knife, but this obscured everything in the process. Nothing was clear and the image was transformed into something else. You couldn't see the image. So I had to find another way so that it would retain its force after being "processed" (meaning the application of the circle strokes) and where the strokes would effect a sense of motion.
I think it is similar to the application of a computer software. For example, you can use Photoshop to produce various effects like bas-relief. I think all designers have an idea of "process", that is, every piece of work must be processed, and that inspired me. I think you can also arrive at such an idea by "processing" a sketch. An artist can use a computer to form his own style. Even if you process your images or compositions in Photoshop, your personal style will still present itself.
For me, this process aligns my work with media, which all undergo a process. Many of the pictures we see have been processed, so what you see is not the original thing. My intention is to achieve better effects but so far I have not had much success. I need to work on it more. Process can be explained this way: When I made a mistake at school I was afforded the opportunity to learn a lesson. Which means the present situation needs some modification.

Li: "All media is processed. Most of the pictures we see have been processed. What you see is not the original thing." These are very interesting points. But to what degree your works will be processed should be in line with your internal need. Whether you are going to process it into bas-relief or print effect should be clear to the audience. Processing it for process' sake is pointless.
Yue: That's true, and the work might well be worse after being "processed". But many images should not have been processed but they were. The results might not be good, but the need or the urge was there. Taking photographs of pop stars for instance, their wrinkles and blemishes are all removed; their skin becomes smoother, but actually more false. Some people like the false, processed result, and some don't. Being "removed" means being decorated. As with the post-production of a film, computers are widely used to process pictures and documents in any way the user chooses. I don't care about that. How is looks is not important.

Li: Disposing of wrinkles and blemishes and making the skin appear smoother caters to the public's need for (fake) ideals. This process deals with the very relationships between "process and falsity", "process and public preference", and there is the point. You can also find another process method in relation to that.
Yue: The approach I have taken is an easy one but the average person has no idea what I'm trying to say. They wonder why I draw so many circles. It seems odd. But in spite of this, maybe I will draw circles all this year, produce ten or even twenty works. Then next year I will get another idea and "process" another ten or twenty works. Perhaps this mode of working appears to echo a degree of formalism.

Li: It should not be simply formalism. You have to know what you are going to express.
Yue: My personal sense is that an artist should draw in five or six styles at the same time. A real artist should take up this today and that tomorrow, shouldn't he?

Li: That depends. Some people like to hold on to one style all their life, and some can do several things simultaneously. Some are more versatile and some are more constant.
Yue: What do you see artists as living for?

Li: To express their feelings. The feelings of life in this age can not be replaced by those of any other age. The present seems terribly superficial, but just how superficial is it? That's a concrete problem. To visualize your own feelings of the superficiality is an interesting thing.
Yue: What's the practical or immediate significance?

Li: Reality. The thundering overtures of Beethoven's music is a feeling; Deng Lijun (an influential Chinese singer) shows another feeling. All are warmly welcomed because people have tired of the sobriety of the past. The present time demands tenderness. The artists' job is to disclose the feelings. Everyone may have certain feelings for a thing but not all have a way to be heard. When find a way to voice your feelings, and the more you "speak" the closer it gets to the "truth", so that it arouses an echo in people, then you have a far greater possibility of achieving success.

(October 10, 2002)