You're so Manet

Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère", early 1880s

The year before his death, French painter Édouard Manet put forward his A Bar at the Folies-Bergère at the 1882 Paris Salon exhibition. The painting is both a culmination of his interest in scenes of urban leisure and spectacle, a subject that he had developed in dialogue with Impressionism over the previous decade, and also a visual conundrum in which the more the spectator considers his own role within the painting, the more he becomes aware of himself as an active element within the painting and not merely a detached viewer.

Impressionism painting characteristics include emphasis on depiction of light in its changing qualities, inclusion of movement as an essential element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. This calls into question the world as existing objectively, thus the painter himself, and we as the spectator, become active elements within the overall reality of the painting.

Jeff Wall's "A picture for women", 1979

Wall invites his spectators to consider the gaze of the subjects from the perspective of the female model, the male photographer, and the camera, reminding us not only of Manet's work, but also of "Las Meninas" by Velasquez.


Yue Min Jun's "You're so Manet", 2001

In Yue Min Jun's work is that we can find apparent visual and stylistic consistencies within his work, including the laughing self-portrait,  repetition/ representation of the individual and the collectivity, and an artificial aesthetic.

In his work of imitations of a variety of well-known cultural and artistic references, we encounter the paradox in which on the one hand are these apparent visual and stylistic consistencies in each imitation, yet on the other hand, the implicit references contained in each painting are different.

To be continued...