Yue Minjun is a contemporary Chinese artist known for his inventive take on self-portraiture. Grouped into the Cynical Realism movement in China, alongside artists Fang Lijun and Liu Wei, he refutes this labelling of his work. His brightly colored depictions of maniacally laughing figures are influenced both by Pop Art and Surrealism. His works act as a tacit form of social and political critique which deals with both Chinese history and the Western canon of art. “I’m actually trying to make sense of the world,” he said of his work. “There’s nothing cynical or absurd in what I do.” Born in 1962 in Daqing City, China, Minjun studied at Hebei Normal University in the 1980s, training as a painter, sculptor, and printmaker. Bearing witness to the restrictive regime which led to the Tiananmen Square massacre of protestors, he began using his art to understand the societal changes taking place in China over the following decades. In 2008, the artist collaborated with KAWS to produce a number of figurines which blend their two distinctive styles. He currently lives and works in Beijing, China. The artist’s works are held in the collections of the Denver Art Museum, the Shenzhen Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky ( 16 December [O.S. 4 December] 1866 – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in western art, possibly after Hilma af Klint. Born in Moscow, he spent his childhood in Odessa, where he graduated at Grekov Odessa Art school. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat (today Tartu, Estonia)—Kandinsky began… more