Art News

Yue Minjun Warriors Stand in Formation at the Milwaukee Art Museum

artwork: Yue Minjun - "Contemporary Chinese Warriors", 2006 - Courtesy of The Milwaukee Art Museum


MILWAUKEE, WIS.- The Milwaukee Art Museum presents the installation Chinese Contemporary Warriors by world-renowned contemporary artist Yue Minjun, in conjunction with its Summer of CHINA series of exhibitions. This latest addition to the ambitious CHINA lineup will be on view through December 2011. Yue Minjun, a leading contemporary artist based in Beijing, China, is best known for his self-portrait paintings. Yue casts himself in a variety of large-scale compositions, and always with a grotesquely wide-mouthed, laughing face. Referencing the utopian propaganda of earlier Chinese Social realist paintings, his work creates allegories critical of the Chinese government in works that are humorously laced with cynicism.