Chinese Contemporary Warriors Stand in Formation at the Milwaukee Art Museum

MILWAUKEE, WIS.- The Milwaukee Art Museum presents the installation Chinese Contemporary Warriors by world-renowned contemporary artist Yue Minjun, in conjunction with its Summer of CHINA series of exhibitions. This latest addition to the ambitious CHINA lineup will be on view through December 2011.

“The work of Yue Minjun invites exploration into the relationship between contemporary art and current issues in modern Chinese society,” said Brady Roberts, chief curator of the Milwaukee Art Museum. “Yue provides another perspective to what currently comprises the Summer of CHINA experience.”

Yue Minjun, a leading contemporary artist based in Beijing, China, is best known for his self-portrait paintings. Yue casts himself in a variety of large-scale compositions, and always with a grotesquely wide-mouthed, laughing face. Referencing the utopian propaganda of earlier Chinese Social realist paintings, his work creates allegories critical of the Chinese government in works that are humorously laced with cynicism.

“Chinese Contemporary Warriors is a sculptural installation that continues in the same manner of satire,” said Roberts. “Mindlessly happy in their uniformity, the compliant citizens of this absurd army recall the famed terra-cotta warriors from Xian. Rather than the serious visages of the warriors, however, these figures convey ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.’”

Chinese Contemporary Warriors is currently on display in the Museum’s Contemporary Galleries on the Main Level.

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