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At the core of this paper are two history paintings, one Chinese and one European. The Execution (1995) by YUE Minjun is an appropriation of Edouard Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico (1868-69), with the former drawing inspiration from the June 4th Tiananmen Protest and its catastrophic crackdown, and the latter the ill-fated French occupation of Mexico in the second half of the nineteenth century. Comparisons will be drawn between the art, the artists, the histories behind the art and the controversies about the art.(1)
Foreign media want to understand China… they focus on this or that painter because his paintings reflect what they feel in their hearts [about China]. It is a subjective judgment.(2)
Yue Minjun, remarking on his being chosen to be one of Time’s “People Who Mattered”, 2007.
IN transcultural encounters, with all their complexities and contradictions, one observable pattern perhaps is that we tend to see only what we want to see in each other and take only what is convenient.
Very recently, contemporary Chinese paintings have been attracting great attention, grabbing newspaper headlines with record auction prices.(3) Artists like Yue Minjun, Zhang Xiaogang, Zeng Fanzhi and Liu Xiaodong have become darlings of art galleries and art collectors. Works of theirs can fetch millions of dollars in no time. In 2007, Liu’s New Migrants of Three Gorges Dam was sold for US$2.7 million and Yue’s The Pope raked in about US$4.3 million. In April this year, Zhang’s Bloodline: The Big Family No. 3 obtained more than US$6 million.(4)
Even the Chinese government, it is said, has recognized the practical link of the art industry to GDP growth, with Beijing authorities advertising an art district in the city as a must-see destination
for Olympics tourists.(5) In the not-so-distant past, art was to serve politics. Now, it is economics.
It is not the sheer economic value of these contemporary Chinese paintings that interest us here, but, being students of culture and transcultural encounters, we are primarily concerned about cross-cultural influence in these paintings, and how an understanding of these will enhance our understanding of the cultures in question.
Hence, here we will focus on the links between two particular Chinese and European artists and paintings, and from these we will try to broaden our inquiry to Sino-European transcultural encounters.
The artists are Yue Minjun (1962- ) and Edouard Manet (1832-1883). The former has conspicuously based his Execution (1995), sold in 2007 for a then record-breaking US$5.9 million, on the latter’s famous history painting, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico (1868-69).(6)
This appropriation begs the questions: What is the link between the two (paintings, artists, histories, etc.)? Why did Yue, a representative figure of avant-garde art in China,(7) choose to base his painting on a European master’s work but not a Chinese master’s? In what sense do we see a break with traditional Chinese painting? And a continuation—if any?
This appropriation bears an extra poignancy that goes beyond art lovers’ interest by the mere fact that the inspiration of Yue’s execution, as he frankly admits it, was the June 4 Tiananmen Massacre in 1989.(8)
Is Yue a June-4 sympathizer, as the former owner of his Execution—a Westerner—had glimpsed from his painting?(9) Do we see a “conscience” emerging once again from Mainland artists, who were also moved by the tragic event to bear witness or to simply make a statement, to speak in artistic forms of what is unspeakable, in the footsteps of, say, literary giant Gao Xingjian and other exiled writers?(10)
These are serious questions that, in this short paper, I can only hope to shed some light on by exploring the contexts of the paintings in question, much less to give a definitive answer.
Why Appropriate? Speaking in Subtraction
To begin with, why appropriate at all? And why European masters’ paintings? According to Yue’s own explanation, it all began in the early 1990s when he wanted to try painting not by adding something to a canvas but by deleting something from it. Since no one can delete anything from a blank canvas, he decided to play with existing, well-known paintings, so the viewer’s attention will be forced to focus on what has been deleted.(11) “Deletion as message” is key to understanding Yue’s Execution, as we shall see later.
Manet’s Execution was not the only appropriation that Yue ever did. For example, in 1995, the same year that he conceived his version of the Execution, he also did another appropriation of Manet’s other masterpiece, The Luncheon on the Grass (1863).
Nor was Manet the only European master from whom Yue has drawn inspiration; others include Diego Velázquez (Pope Innocent X and Las Meninas) and Eugène Delacroix (The Massacre in Chios and Liberty Leading the People).
It is not the case that Yue has only drawn inspiration from foreign masters, either. In one of his earliest appropriations, Yue played around with one of the best known post-1949 Chinese paintings of all time—Dong Xiwen’s Founding Ceremony of China. This is obviously an earlier work by Yue as he was still drawing faces other than his own—probably those of his acquaintances.(12) In this appropriation, Mao Zedong, who had appeared in the original (1953) painting giving a speech to a sea of people filling the entirety of Tiananmen Square, was cut in half—only his pair of legs and shoes can be seen. This is in devious reference to the bizarre history of the original painting itself: the content of the painting had to undergo several revisions to first edit out and then restore disgraced leaders.(13)
Chinese inspiration was also behind the trademark laughing face of Yue’s paintings. According to the artist himself, he was thunderstruck by a fellow Chinese artist Geng Jian-Yi’s The Second State (1987), which reminded him of the Maitreya Buddha, who often takes the form of a pot-bellied, laughing Buddha in Chinese temples.(14) Yue finds in laughing a constructive response to hardships and sufferings when every other response proves futile: a philosophy developed through his previous work experience in a “socialist machinery” where “every Chinese had to use smiling and laughing to cover up their state of helplessness” in a minefield of hierarchies and guanxi (relationship) networks behind a façade of solidarity and equality.(15)
Which brings us back to the one pair of paintings that we’re trying to understand here… To some in the West, Yue’s Execution is a duo statement of sympathy towards those sacrificed in the June 4 Tiananmen Massacre on the one hand, and of accusation against the perpetrators on the other. The laughs, the underpants and the “shadowless rifles” are just Yue’s signature way of expressing this grievance. According to the former owner of the painting, a Westerner, who has made a fortune out of it (he had initially purchased it for US$32,200 or 1/183 of the auction price in 2007), the way to interpret the painting is...
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1. This paper was presented on May 16th 2008 at the “International Conference: Sino-European Transcultural Encounters” held in the Macau Inter-University Institute, Macau, China.
2. My translation of his remarks in Chinese: “国外的媒体想了解中国，他们来到中国观察了解后，用自己的主观判断得出了这么一个结论。他们可能觉得，这个画家画的比较符合他们心里的感受，所以就比较关注这个画家，我觉得可能是这样吧。” (岳敏君专访：绘画要不靠谱，不喜欢作品挂在展馆里—. [An interview with Yue Minjun: Paintings need no model and are not good to be hung in exhibtion hall]; from World Art Net — http://www.artokok.com/infohtml/2008/03/05/ index39977.html, retrieved on April 12th 2008).
3. “中国当代画作价格飞涨如炒股” (The prices of contemporary Chinese paintings soar like equity securities), Ming Pao News, October 14th 2007; Hannah Beech, “Asian Artists Paint the Color of Money”, Time Magazine, November 1st 2007.
4. At the time of writing this paper, Zeng Fanzhi’s Mask Series 1996 No. 6 was sold for US$9.7 million in an auction in Hong Kong.
5. Hannah Beech, “Asian Artists Paint the Color of Money”, Time Magazine, November 1st 2007.
6. There is an assertion that Yue has also borrowed from Francisco de Goya’s Third of May, 1808 (1814). However, it seems clear to me that the more direct appropriation comes from Manet’s rather than Goya’s painting (needless to say, the fact that Manet had also based his painting on Goya’s painting complicates the comparison), especially when we take into account the prominent position of the executioner on the far right.
7. Feng Boyi, “To Be Is Just Absurd: The Art of Yue Minjun”, in Karen Smith ed., Reproduction Icons: Yue Minjun Works 2004-2006, Shenzhen, Museum Collection Services Co., 2006, p. 9.
8. Elizabeth Yuan, “Execution artist rejects Tiananmen label”, CNN.com, October 15th 2007.
9. Elizabeth Yuan, “Painting’s owner un-executed”, CNN.com, October 12th 2007.
10. Gao XingJian, the 2000 Nobel laureate for literature, had written a play in 1989-90, “Fugitive”, based on the June 4 Massacre with open criticism against those in power.
11. Li Jianting and Yue Minjun, Creation of a Superficial Idol, October 10th 2002, from http://www.yueminjun.com/en/biography/bio07.html, retrieved on April 30th 2008. Other websites that carry Yue’s June 4th remarks: http://arts.tom.com/1029/200525-19714.html, http://www.xtpo.cn/Info/InfoDetail.do?id=69434&aid=69417&apage=5. Websites that don’t: http://test.cl2000.com/detail.php?iInfoID_1903.html, http://www.xbarts.com/ddxx.asp?id=1866, http://www.pyoart.com/artist/yueminjun/html/diologue_7.asp.
12. Ibid.
13. Chang-Tai Hung, “Oil Paintings and Politics: Weaving a Heroic Tale of the Chinese Communist Revolution”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, No. 49, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 783-814.
14. Yue Minjun, “Yue Minjun by Himself” in Karen Smith ed., Reproduction Icons: Yue Minjun Works 2004-2006, op. cit., pp. 16-17.
15. Ibid., pp. 18-19.
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Martin CHUNG Chi-Kei is a lecturer at the Macau Inter-University Institute. He teaches Cross-Cultural Interaction, among other subjects, and is interested in comparative cultural studies, cultural history and interpretive anthropology. His research covers regional reconciliation in Northeast Asia and in Europe, and the role of religion in the modern world. |
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| Issue 6.1 |
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The Sorcerer’s
Apprentices
—A Global Tale
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