The figures in You Minjun’s works are always stuck in extreme emotional conditions, and appear to have lost their rational judgment. They are rendered as beings who ae either dull-witted or insane. These works suggest an age-old motive in art history, that is, the theme of “fool” in the Flemish School. During the Renaissance, lunatics and fools were no longer regarded as people in touch with God s in the medieval Age, but taken as those possessed by demons or deprived of reason. The way to deal with this sort of people was to secure them on boats given a small store of food and banished from the cities as the boat was left to run its own course. The subject of the “fool” was a perpetual theme portrayed by Flemish painters, especially Bosch and Bruegel. In this way, they satirized the ignorance and stupidity of the church and the control of religion over the people. In their view, Various vulgar and evil customs or practices of mankind could be found in those lunatics, which then served as a metaphor for reality.

Similar to the Flemish painters of the Renaissance period. Yue Muijun’s painting is the art of provoking laughter. Just as in our era, his art provoking laughter. Just as in our era, his picture often show clearly the power carried by so-called “superficiality”.
The humorous aura he creates is so appealing that we frequently overlook the profound meaning behind the paintings themselves. When roughly generalizing his paintings, people tend to place emphasis on the fact that his work often takes the self as its object and offers a mockery of ego. Actually, to thoughtful people, the characters in his paintings are not only the artist himself, but also us.

Yue Minjun’s art has the power to penetrate directly the human heart. This power stems from the “abandonment” of the self. Yue Minjun Used the word “abandonment” when he described his earliest works in the early 1990s. This word very much embodies the features of that period, in the 1980s, a group of artists regarded their creation as a means to save and reform society. But the course of history shattered those artist’s dream. Yet in the 1990s, a new species of artists emerged, and Yew Minjun was among them. The social situation since reform and opening-up has led these artists to discover that although previous artists had endeavored very hard for almost then years, yet within society, there still existed an overwhelming counter-force. It is not always possible in fact for artists to realize their creative intuition. Thus, the sentiments of cynicism and misanthropy began to pervade the art world. Yue minjun and his counters employ plain, boring and absurd scenes from life to ridicule society. Those with a discerning eye will see that beneath his jokes and abandonment there actually lies a more profound conviction. Differing from previous artists, in the work of Yue Minjun this belief arises in the form of “irony”. The basic logic in his art uses “vogue”, “coarse” and “meaninglessness” as a counterpoint to “nobility” and “meaning” in the ruling social discourse, and tries to restore the dignity desired of by the self.