Celebrated Chinese painter Yue Minjun first rose to fame in the 1990s as a key member of Beijing’s Cynical Realism movement. Inspired by Pop Art and surrealism, Yue’s best-known work serves as a form of social and political critique, thinly veiled behind his figures’ memorably maniacal smiles. Almost all of Yue’s protagonists are self-portraits, this work included. Here, however, instead of smiling, Yue’s lips are puckered, his scalp removed to reveal the late Communist leader Mao Zedong swimming inside his head in a powerful visual manifestation of brainwashing.
