Free and Leisure-10 (2003) by Yue MinjunToday Art Museum
Laughing...laughing...and keep on laughing until it starts hurting. Until you can't stand it anymore!
It seems like an idyllic situation: a group of people having fun during an outdoor swim. But do you really feel comfortable?
The faces, all alike, are the artist's self-portraits. Yue Minjun, with great self-irony, was not so gracious in depicting his own image.
The hints of baldness, slouching bodies, the skin of anomalous pink. This is not exactly "ideal beauty".
Their ugliness contrasts with the beauty of the environment, inspired by Renaissance landscapes, or Rousseau's exotic settings.
Maybe that's what the artist is laughing about: the antithesis between the ideal world portrayed by the media and the ugly reality. The mouths are wide open in a burst of laughter like a black hole. Laughing until you can't stand it anymore.
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