An Alternative Performance

Yue Minjun was born in 1962 in the town if Daqing in Heilongjiang, China. Between 1985 and 1989 he studied fine arts at the Normal University of Hebei province in eastern China. Later on, he worked as an art teacher in a school affiliated with an oil company, but after getting fired in 1991, he moved to the Yuan Ming Yuan art village. The village, located a few kilometers northwest from Beijing, hosted a new generation of artists that had something different to tell, than their avant-garde predecessors in the preceding decade.Different artists living together in the community of Yuan Ming Yuan resulted in art work interpreted as a homogenous entity. The category "Cynical Realism" has been used to describe the artists of the art village since the beginning of the 1990s. According to this concept, these paintings express the hopeless frustration of their generation in the 1990s through the depiction of the fusion of capitalism and socialism.In my opinion, however, there are two major problems with this concept.First, it limits the interpretation to only specific notions, such as sarcasm, boredom and helplessness, which the interpreters actually use to analyze themselves and the political and social problems of China. This distracts our attention from analyzing what we actually see on the paintings. Secondly, it indicates that the art of Yue Minjun is a representation of reality, a sarcastic interpretation of Contemporary Chinese society and its history. I argue that this description sidetracks the interpretation as it unconsciously interprets the art of Yue Minjun within a modernist tradition, instead of a contemporary context.Thus, this thesis has two intentions. Firstly, it will discuss Yue Minjun in an artistic context that he has not been related to. Secondly, it will elaborate the contemporary nature of the art of Yue Minjun. As a result, this thesis can be regarded as a reinterpretation of Yue Minjun as well as a discussion of the contemporary nature of contemporary Chinese art.In this thesis, I will argue that the art of Yue Minjun is not the representation of any sort of reality, but a mixture of fragments from Chinese and Western art history. I suggest that the art of Yue Minjun is a playful performance dealing with the representation of a Chinese identity and the commodity nature of contemporary art. This thesis will interpret the paintings of Yue Minjun through the analyzation of contemporary art and performance art.Based on my observations, both the English word "performance art" and its Chinese equivalent that "xingwei yishu" (which is best translated as behavioral art) point out that the most important characteristic of this kind of art is that the artist becomes a part of it. He is not only the manufacturer of an artwork anymore, but a participant of a situation. Besides, the main problem performance art or "xingwei yishu" deals with is the identity of the artist. Based this definition of performance art, the artist from being an outsider and a manufacturer of a meaningful artifact has become the main object of art. The individuality and the identity of the artist has become the artwork itself. As for the art of Yue Minjun, the main problem he is concerned with is to find an answer to who he actually is as a Chinese artist. Certainly, he does not use his own body to "perform", but paints a character that merely appears to be him, which questions his identity.The significance of this thesis lies in two main points. First, if we analyze the paintings of Yue Minjun from the perspective elaborated above, we can interpret his art in a new way. Besides, this research points out that contemporary paintings do not necessarily have fixed meanings, but their meaning can constantly change or expand as they or their environments change.