Yue Minjun

Karen Smith, Yue Minjun; The Lost Self, Beijing 2005, p. 90, illustrated in colour

Executed in 1997, Yue Minjun's The Pope is arguably his most vocal expression in the cynical realist mode of the shattered idealism that followed in the wake of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations the previous decade. Just as Francis Bacon had appropriated Diego Velasquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X and transformed it into an existentialist expression of the zeitgeist of his age, so here Yue Minjun appropriates Bacon's image, radically translating the iconic screaming head into the artist's own beaming self-image.

Of all the schools that emerged in the wake of the New Art Movement in China, the Cynical Realists, spearheaded by Yue Minjun and Fang Lijun, were the youngest and most energetic. Their mockery of the world illustrated their scepticism and mistrust of terms such as modernisation, advance and reform in the face of the State's duplicity. Yue Minjun's sardonically grinning self-image, which is a repeated motif throughout his oeuvre, is his self-ironic response to the spiritual vacuum of modern China. These clones of the artist, often appearing with closed eyes as in the present work, stand as a metaphor for the superannuated principles of collectivism and egalitarianism championed by the State which in fact inhibited individualism and artistic creativity.

While Fang Lijun vented his frustrations at the stiflingly oppressive political climate through depictions of disaffected youths in contemporary garb, Yue mines the rich seam of art history for his iconography, couching his polemic in an overtly Western idiom. In The Pope, Yue appropriates one of the most immediately recognisable images from art history and turns it into a visage of his own time. While Velasquez' portrait was painted to confer greatness on the esteemed spiritual leader, Yue's reinterpretation is designed as a savagely sardonic slur on his totalitarian political environment. Keeping the midnight palette favoured by Bacon in his first series of popes, Yue wittily replaces the shrill scream with an alarmingly inane, absurdist laugh. The grinning face, reminiscent of the smiling visages of propagandist posters designed to co-opt citizens into working for the common good of the State, is here used to convey irreverent ambivalence as the only remaining defence against political oppression. This reaches its apogee in the present work, thanks to the loaded connotations that come with his appropriation of Bacon's infamous image. While Bacon's pope grips the armrests of his throne in a fit of existential anguish, in Yue's picture the body is contorted with maniacal laughter. The motif of the exposed teeth, which Bacon derived from a film still of the screaming nurse in Battleship Potemkin and incorporated into many of his images, reaches its hyperbolic conclusion in Yue's motif of the smile replete with all thirty-two teeth in a single row. While Bacon's screaming popes strove to enshrine the primal suffering of flesh and spirit, Yue's laughing self-image represents the only reaction left when those screams of anguish pass ignored.  

The absurdity of Yue's image is further enhanced by the fact that the vestal robes, designed to confer dignity on the spiritual leader, stop short of his abdomen and legs, exposing his briefs. The crimson mantle which is a consistent motif in the papal portraits from the High Renaissance is painted black, and while Yue keeps the white collar he removes the white surplice that covers his dignity. Reminiscent of Martin Kippenberger's Self-Portrait in his underpants, this ignominy is the final stage in the brutal debasement of Yue's art historical paradigm. Just as Kippenberger knocked the figure of the artist off the pedestal that art history had reverentially constructed for him, here Yue shows the artist overcome by lunacy. Yue further subverts the grandeur of art history by his stylistic handling of the subject, translating Bacon's sinuous expressive brushstroke into a Pop inspired flatness that nods in the direction of commercial advertising and the Communist propaganda painting which was forced upon him as a youth. Instead of the benign images of the healthy smiling proletariat that populated the billboards of the PRC, Yue's image depicts the artist as pontificate who has usurped the seat of authority. The fact that the seat itself bears a striking similarity to Andy Warhol's depictions of the electric chair in his Death and Disaster series insinuates a darker strand to Yue's embodiment of China's outcast generation.

An icon of Chinese avant garde art, The Pope takes its position in the tradition of papal representations that stretches from Raphael, Titian and Velasquez through Bacon to Maurizio Cattelan. Acutely aware of the resonance of the image in Western art, like Cattelan's La Nona Ora, 1999, Yue plays on its instant legibility and associative meanings to create an image which is at once a shocking and caustic subversion of art history and a damning indictment of the prevailing political climate in China in the late 1990s.