Yue Minjun - Execution

1995

150 x 300 cm.
Oil on Canvas

(click to enlarge)

Wheter the violent disarray caused by modern art or the rise of digital art packed with worldwide approach, something certainly displaced the cultural eyes of the western hemisphere. Seeking inexperienced aesthetics and fresh co-relations, we put our artistic overdeveloped field (where everything seems to be already done) in a second plan and finally twist our head around.

The hassles and the emancipation of the biggest emerging countries Brazil, China, Russia and India allows a counterpoint in originality and makes the universalization of the art history a reality. Taking China as an example, the open communism enabled artists to research and experiment new visual possibilities, inasmuch as it doesn't overtly criticizes the state. Yet, does this command still match the globalization context?

In 1996 the english stockbroker Trevor Simon founded the picture "Execution" by Yue Minjun hidden in Hong Kong Gallery and bought it for $32,000, under the conditions of keeping the artwork a secret to protect Yue Minjun from political harassments.

Eleven years later the picture was sold for nearly $6 million at Sotheby's auction house in London. Yue Minjun is currently the most important active artist in the People's Republic of China and some of his paintings have already broken records as the most expensive canvases in the history.

The grinning faces are self-portraits of the chinese artist, exhaustively applied in his works, it couldn't represent better China's Cynical Realism. In "Execution", a brilliant satire on the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989, these laughs overlap the canvas and bewilder every sign of seriousness or manifest. There are no guns or military uniforms, everything collapses into the comical faces.


Joke or manifest, Execution and its disclosure reforces the conscience of an underlaying linked world. Such bridges, being aerial, marine, electromagnetic or digital, are an alternative for artists in countries with the contrast of outbursting economy and government pressure to somehow overcome.