Yue Minjun

Yue Minjun was born in 1962 in the town of Daqing in Heilongjiang, China. Yue's family had been working on oil fields and when Yue was six, his family moved from Daqing Oil Field to Jianghan Oil Field. When he was ten, his family moved to Beijing. He eventually went to Tianjin after high school and moved to Hebei to find education and work, there he studied oil painting, he graduated from the Hebei Normal University in 1983.

In the 1980s, he started painting portraits of his co-workers and the sea while he was engaged in deep-sea oil drilling. In 1989, he was inspired by a painting by Geng Jianyi at an art show in Beijing, which depicted Geng's own laughing face. In 1990, he eventually moved to Hongmiao in the Chaoyang District, Beijing, which was also home to other Chinese artists. During this period, his style of art developed out of portraits of his bohemian friends from the artists' village. It is important to note that Yue had been living a "nomadic" existence for much of his life, because his family often moved in order to find work on various oilfields.

The roots of Yue Minjun's style can be traced back to the work of Geng Jianyi, which had first inspired Yue with his work of his own laughing face. Apart from that, Yue had also studied oil painting in the Hebei Normal University from 1985 to 1989. Over the years, Yue Minjun's style has also rapidly developed. Yue often challenges social and cultural conventions by depicting objects and even political issues in a radical and abstract manner. He has also shifted his focus from the technical aspects to the "whole concept of creation".

Yue Minjun’s first museum show in the United States took place at the Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York. The show, Yue Minjun and the Symbolic Smile, featured bronze and polychrome sculptures, paintings and drawings.