This sale falls on the heels of Christie’s record-breaking sale of Asian Contemporary Art in November 2007 and will offer unrivalled examples from leading Contemporary Art masters from China, Japan, Korea, India and throughout Asia, including works from artists such as Zeng Fanzhi, Yue Minjun, Zhang Xiaogang, Wang Guangyi, Hong Kyoung Tack, Kim Tschang Yeul, Yoyoi Kusama, Aida Makoto, Yasuyuki

Nishio, and Hisashi Tenmyouya. Offering 417 works across two important days of sales, this is the largest and most valuable offer of Asian Contemporary Art ever presented.

Chinese Contemporary Art
Chinese contemporary artists display a myriad range of styles. Yue Minjun’s work, with its vivid imagery and unique stylistic features, occupies a very special position in Contemporary Chinese art.

Standing as the pioneer extraordinaire of the Cynical Realism art movement, Yue Minjun is a cynic with a distinctively positive response to adversity: laughter. The now iconic grins that adorn the art of Yue Minjun – often self-portraits of the artist – have become synonymous with a mocking ridicule of contemporary society. Beyond the mockery and jokes, however, there lies a profound conviction; if one peels beneath the narcissistic layers, Yue Minjun’s artwork is steeped in history, religion, culture and Eastern philosophy. This season, Christie’s is proud to present collectors with several important works from the artist.

Gweong-Gweong marks one of the most ground-breaking works from Yue Minjun and is largely considered to be one of his best early works. ‘Gweong Gweong’ references the Chinese language sound effects for jets, seen here dropping their cargo as they rise over Tian’anmen Square. China’s Gate of Heavenly Peace is the backdrop for this scene, with a small yet striking image of Mao. Hundreds of uniformed cheerleaders are seen rushing the gates in joyous unison. High above, the jets are not dropping bombs, but the repeated images of Yue Minjun’s grinning self-image, seemingly unaware of their freefall. Despite the sardonic edge to this work, the overall impact is giddy – even celebratory. As such, Yue provides insights into the psychological ambiguities and strains felt by his generation, one in which soldiers are sent to fight wars they don’t fully understand and citizens are forced to adopt superficially sunny dispositions whatever their circumstances. With an overt and powerful political message very rarely seen in Yue Minjun’s work, Gweong-Gweong stands among the most significant works from the artist
to come to auction.

Great Solidarity was created in 1992, a critical year for Yue Minjun as an artist . During the early nineties, societal changes forced Yue to move beyond his past successes and to comment on these changes directly through his artwork. With this work, Yue began to narrate personal experiences as he had not done in the past, and in doing so, established his trademark style of rows of repeated figures of his image, a theme he experimented with as a means to express tension and power – or more often, a lack of power. Big Swans (estimate: HK$ 10,000,000 – 15,000,000 / US$ 1,282,100 – 1,923,100), painted in 2003, is the most recent work by Yue Minjun offered in Christie’s Evening Sale of Asian Contemporary Art. An immediate striking feature of this artwork is the layout of the composition whereby Yue segregates his two ‘groups’ - flying swans on the one side and a row of his replicating self on the other, both apparently sneering at the ludicrous aspects of the other. The four images of Yue snigger whilst pointing their fingers towards the swans in the childish way of imitating a gun. Lost tradition, nostalgia, aggression and Eastern symbolism are all bound within the inspirations of classical Chinese painting.

Tags: asian art, Chinese Art

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