The Search for Terrorists 6
(Looking for whom being defined as Terrorist)
By YUE MIN JUN
Propylene on canvas
Dimensions = 220 X 300 cm

During the summer of 2006 Yue Min Jun created his 8 paintings entitled “The Search for Terrorists”, numbered from 1 to 8.

Their minimum dimensions are 200 x 300 cm, and the series has since taken on mythical status.

First shown at a Beijing exhibition in autumn 2006, several pictures were immediately acquired by a Museum and a Foundation.

The painting “The Search for Terrorists 6” (Propylene on canvas – 2006 – 220X300) portrays an apparently innocuous scene, faceless individuals wandering through an impersonal universe that could just as easily be a shopping centre in Dubai as a square in a suburban new town in Europe.

Recapturing the streamlined aesthetic of the first “Made in China” video games in the ‘70s, the group gives the impression of a harmonious, almost joyous, world in perpetual motion.

This impression is then forcibly contradicted by the title of the work “The Search for Terrorists 6”, a direct reference to the appalling manhunt (a key pursuit in this troubled world of ours) which is emblematic of our threatened world.

YUE MIN JUN has become the most expensive contemporary Chinese artist in the world since the sale of his picture “The Pope” for £ 2,200,000 at Sotheby’s in London on 21 June 2007, and his masterpiece ultimately delivers a message of biblical simplicity.

Our world has become a vast video game, and we have to show a good grasp of the rules if we want to have any hope of winning (taking part).