The cover for this issue of Artkrush is a detail from Noah's Ark, a 2005 oil painting by Yue Minjun. The piece is currently on display at the Queens Museum of Art in the artist's first solo US museum show, Yue Minjun and the Symbolic Smile, which includes recent paintings, drawings, and bronze and polychrome sculptures.

Born in 1962 in China's Heilongjiang province, Yue grew up under Mao Zedong's reign. His father worked in the oil fields of northeast China, and Yue himself labored in the state oil sector until his director allowed him to leave for art school. He attended Hebei Normal University, studying oil painting, and witnessed the rise and fall of the Chinese art scene of the '80s. With his distinct synthesis of the humorous and the horrific, Yue has achieved incredible success in the international art market. His 1995 painting Execution, inspired by the Tiananmen Square massacre, sold at auction for nearly $6 million this past October, making it the second most expensive contemporary Chinese painting sold to date. He is currently represented by Art Beatus in Vancouver and Chinese Contemporary in Beijing, London, and New York.

Yue's recent work features the artist's laughing face, caught between ecstasy and idiocy and projected into iconic cultural images. Identical huge grins animate each member of Contemporary Terracotta Warriors, a riff on Qin-dynasty burial statues, and the artist makes a cheeky appearance behind the Folies-Bergère bar in You're So Manet. Enigmatic and inescapable, Yue's pervasive smile spreads both contagious joy and manic unease. (LM)

Yue Minjun and the Symbolic Smile is on view at the Queens Museum of Art in New York through January 6.