Yue Minjun: Chinese Contemporary Warriors

The Milwaukee Art Museum is proud to present the installation Chinese Contemporary Warriors by world-renowned contemporary artist Yue Minjun, in conjunction with its Summer of CHINA series of exhibitions.

Based in Beijing, China, Yue Minjun 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.

Chinese Contemporary Warriors is a sculptural installation that continues in the same manner of satire. Mindlessly happy in their uniformity, the compliant citizens of this absurd army recall the famed terra-cotta warriors from Xian. Rather than the serious visages of the warriors, however, these figures convey “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”