Yue Minjun – Untitled (Smile-ism No. 13) 2006

Untitled (Smile-ism No. 13) 2006

Artist: Yue Minjun
Title: Untitled (Smile-ism No. 13)
Year: 2006
Medium: Lithograph in colours
Dimensions: 110 × 90 cm (43 1/4 × 35 1/4 in)
Edition: 45 — signed and numbered lower edge "/45 Yue Minjun"
Printer: Hankuk Art Chain Co., Ltd., Gwangju City, Korea
Publisher: Art Issue Editions, New York
Type: Large-format limited edition lithograph

Description

Untitled (Smile-ism No. 13) (2006) is a monumental large-format lithograph from one of the most internationally celebrated Chinese artists of the post-Tiananmen generation — a work that distils Yue Minjun's signature visual obsession into a composition of unsettling chromatic density and psychological complexity. A crowd of identical laughing faces — the artist's own, repeated and multiplied into an undifferentiated mass — press together in a cascade from the upper right to the lower left, their wide-open mouths and closed eyes forming a pattern simultaneously festive and grotesque, joyful and suffocating.

Yue Minjun's grinning self-portrait figure — developed in the early 1990s in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre — is one of the most recognisable images in contemporary Chinese art and one of the most philosophically loaded. The laugh is not a laugh of happiness: it is a laugh of uncertainty, of helplessness, of the complex emotional state of living through historical upheaval with no adequate response available. Yue has described the smile as a mask — the face one puts on when there is nothing else to put on, when laughter is the only remaining gesture available to someone who cannot cry, cannot speak, cannot act. Repeated across the picture plane in Smile-ism No. 13, the individual mask becomes collective: a crowd that is also a single consciousness, a multiplicity that is also an erasure of individuality.

The pink flesh tones — warm, almost tender — rendered in the full colour lithography process give the faces a physical proximity that the subject matter refuses to make comfortable. The white space of the left margin provides the only relief from the press of identical smiling heads: a necessary breath, a gap between the image and the world it cannot quite fill.

Printed by Hankuk Art Chain Co., Ltd., Gwangju City — a specialist fine art printing house — and published by Art Issue Editions, New York, in an edition of just 45. At 110 × 90 cm, this is a large-format work of significant physical and institutional presence. Yue Minjun's paintings have achieved eight-figure results at auction, and his prints in editions of this size are among the most actively collected works in the contemporary Chinese art market.

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FAQ

Is this an original Yue Minjun lithograph?
Yes — an original lithograph in colours, signed and numbered by the artist lower edge "/45 Yue Minjun", from an edition of 45.

What is the edition size?
Strictly limited to 45 impressions — one of the smallest editions in Yue Minjun's print catalogue.

What is Smile-ism?
Smile-ism is one of Yue Minjun's most celebrated series, in which his signature laughing self-portrait figure is multiplied and arranged into crowd compositions — exploring themes of collective identity, historical trauma, and the social function of enforced cheerfulness in contemporary Chinese society.

What is the significance of the laughing face?
Yue Minjun developed his signature grinning self-portrait in the early 1990s as a response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre — the laugh functioning as a mask of uncertainty and helplessness, the only available gesture when more direct responses are impossible.

Who published this work?
Art Issue Editions, New York — a specialist publisher of limited edition prints by leading contemporary Asian artists.

Do you ship internationally?
Yes — worldwide, with museum-grade flat packaging for large-format works on paper, full insurance, and shipment tracking.