前两天Smashing Magazine上免费推出了45个漂亮的Blog头部图片，今天他们又在这篇文章中展示了35张极奇漂亮且逼真的HDR图片。现我把其中一些能下载的已下载，并打包成了Zip文件，总共有18张，大小为20.16MB。

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注：HDR 是英文 High-Dynamic Range 的缩写，中文译名为高动态光照渲染。HDR可以令3D 画面更像真，就像人的眼睛在游戏现场中的视线效果，大幅提升游戏的真实感。

附：其中几张HDR图片
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With 89 galleries, publishers and private dealers from around the world, the fair exhibits prints by contemporary artists alongside rare works from the 16th through 20th centuries. This year it also introduces an ambitious site-specific installation by the emerging artist Nicola López.

Ms. López has transformed the booth of Tandem Press into a landscape of crumbling infrastructure: flowers sprout from barbed wire and leaky pipes (all cutouts of lithographed Mylar). More conventional prints by Ms. López, featuring similar imagery, are also on display.

Other appeals to the contemporary market include more than 100 new editions. Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha and Richard Serra have new works at Gemini G.E.L., as does the architect Frank Gehry (lithographs of his scribbled designs for buildings, including one for the proposed Guggenheim Abu Dhabi). Pratt Contemporary devotes most of a wall to a series of drypoints by the Brazilian artist Ana Maria Pacheco, better known for her wood carvings; titled “Dark Event,” it shows shadowy figures engaged in acts of violence and torture.

Two Palms has a suite of intaglio prints by Chris Ofili (similar to those on view through tomorrow at David Zwirner) and editioned hand-painted collages by Richard Prince, who merges covers of nurse-themed pulp-fiction titles with images clipped from pornographic sources. The complete set of 19 includes a pristine white nurse’s cap.

Artists whose prints hew closely to their paintings are too numerous to catalog; they include Carroll Dunham, Richard Estes, Chris Johansson and Amy Sillman. Yet sometimes, prints reveal an artist’s lesser-known side. The Massachusetts dealer Abigail Furey has several lithographs by Grant Wood (of “American Gothic” fame), including the rare “Sultry Night” (1939). The publishers of this homoerotic image, which shows a nude man pouring water over his torso, had completed only 100 of the edition of 250 when the United States Post Office halted sales on a charge of obscenity.

Single-artist booths are the exception at this fair, but the dealer C. & J. Goodfriend devotes its entire wall space to delicately shaded etchings by James McNeill Whistler. Other American artists with a similar presence include Winslow Homer, whose dramatic rescue-at-sea depiction “Saved” (1889) is at Allinson Gallery, and George Bellows, whose testosterone-soaked scenes of boxing matches turn up frequently.

While Picassos are predictably ubiquitous, one of the fair’s rarities is a signed impression of his etching and engraving “La Minotauromachie” (1935), at Frederick Mulder. From an edition of 55, it was (so the label says) a gift from the artist to the widow of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

French Symbolists like Redon and Post-Impressionists like Toulouse-Lautrec are always popular, but the British make a strong showing this year. The Philadelphia-based dealers Dolan/Maxwell have early engravings by the Surrealist Stanley William Hayter, who is best known as the founder of the peripatetic print workshop Atelier 17. The London dealer Osborne Samuel has etchings of heads by Lucian Freud, whose work in this medium will be celebrated in an exhibition opening Dec. 16 at the Museum of Modern Art. Y.B.A’.s abound at Alan Cristea, notably Julian Opie, Dexter Dalwood and the team of Langlands & Bell.

Traditional Japanese woodblock prints are one of the fair’s main draws, as a category in themselves and as an influence on Western printmakers. Egenolf Gallery has a snowy view of Mount Haruna and other landscapes by Hiroshige; other fine examples can be found at the Art of Japan and Carolyn Staley. The Japanese aesthetic can be seen in Alex Katz’s prints of Maine landscapes (at Graphicstudio/University of South Florida) and in several domestic scenes by Mary Cassatt (at the Old Print Shop).

Old masters are also scattered over several booths, but the Rembrandts and Dürers at David Tunick deserve a close look. Viewing works like these in a fair setting can be a tricky proposition, but not much more so than jostling for a glimpse of the masterpieces in the Met’s “Age of Rembrandt.”

 

Jean Nouvel

A rendering of the Jean Nouvel-designed tower to be built adjacent to the Museum of Modern Art.

 

Jean Nouvel

The interior of Jean Nouvel’s building, which is to include a hotel and luxury apartments.

 

 

 

If New Yorkers once saw their skyline as the great citadel of capitalism, who could blame them? We had the best toys of all.

But for the last few decades or so, that honor has shifted to places like Singapore, Beijing and Dubai, while Manhattan settled for the predictable.

Perhaps that’s about to change.

A new 75-story tower designed by the architect Jean Nouvel for a site next to the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown promises to be the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation. Its faceted exterior, tapering to a series of crystalline peaks, suggests an atavistic preoccupation with celestial heights. It brings to mind John Ruskin’s praise for the irrationality of Gothic architecture: “It not only dared, but delighted in, the infringement of every servile principle.”

Commissioned by Hines, an international real estate developer, the tower will house a hotel, luxury apartments and three floors that will be used by MoMA to expand its exhibition space. The melding of cultural and commercial worlds offers further proof, if any were needed, that Mr. Nouvel is a master at balancing conflicting urban forces.

Yet the building raises a question: How did a profit-driven developer become more adventurous architecturally than MoMA, which has tended to make cautious choices in recent years?

Like many of Manhattan’s major architectural accomplishments, the tower is the result of a Byzantine real estate deal. Although MoMA completed an $858 million expansion three years ago, it sold the Midtown lot to Hines for $125 million earlier this year as part of an elaborate plan to grow still further.

Hines would benefit from the museum’s prestige; MoMA would get roughly 40,000 square feet of additional gallery space in the new tower, which will connect to its second-, fourth- and fifth-floor galleries just to the east. The $125 million would go toward its endowment.

To its credit the Modern pressed for a talented architect, insisting on veto power over the selection. Still, the sale seems shortsighted on the museum’s part. A 17,000-square-foot vacant lot next door to a renowned institution and tourist draw in Midtown is a rarity. And who knows what expansion needs MoMA may have in the distant future?

By contrast the developer seems remarkably astute. Hines asked Mr. Nouvel to come up with two possible designs for the site. A decade ago anyone who was about to invest hundreds of millions on a building would inevitably have chosen the more conservative of the two. But times have changed. Architecture is a form of marketing now, and Hines made the bolder choice.

Set on a narrow lot where the old City Athletic Club and some brownstones once stood, the soaring tower is rooted in the mythology of New York, in particular the work of Hugh Ferriss, whose dark, haunting renderings of an imaginary Manhattan helped define its dreamlike image as the early-20th-century metropolis.

But if Ferriss’s designs were expressionistic, Mr. Nouvel’s contorted forms are driven by their own peculiar logic. By pushing the structural frame to the exterior, for example, he was able to create big open floor plates for the museum’s second-, fourth- and fifth-floor galleries. The tower’s form slopes back on one side to yield views past the residential Museum Tower; its northeast corner is cut away to conform to zoning regulations.

The irregular structural pattern is intended to bear the strains of the tower’s contortions. Mr. Nouvel echoes the pattern of crisscrossing beams on the building’s facade, giving the skin a taut, muscular look. A secondary system of mullions housing the ventilation system adds richness to the facade.

Mr. Nouvel anchors these soaring forms in Manhattan bedrock. The restaurant and lounge are submerged one level below ground, with the top sheathed entirely in glass so that pedestrians can peer downward into the belly of the building. A bridge on one side of the lobby links the 53rd and 54th Street entrances. Big concrete columns crisscross the spaces, their tilted forms rooting the structure deep into the ground.

As you ascend through the building, the floor plates shrink in size, which should give the upper stories an increasingly precarious feel. The top-floor apartment is arranged around such a massive elevator core that its inhabitants will feel pressed up against the glass exterior walls. (Mr. Nouvel compared the apartment to the pied-à-terre at the top of the Eiffel Tower from which Gustave Eiffel used to survey his handiwork below.)

The building’s brash forms are a sly commentary on the rationalist geometries of Edward Durell Stone and Philip L. Goodwin’s 1939 building for the Museum of Modern Art and Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 addition. Like many contemporary architects Mr. Nouvel sees the modern grid as confining and dogmatic. His tower’s contorted forms are a scream for freedom.

And what of the Modern? For some, the appearance of yet another luxury tower stamped with the museum’s imprimatur will induce wincing. But the more immediate issue is how it will affect the organization of the Modern’s vast collections.

The museum is only now beginning to come to grips with the strengths and weaknesses of Mr. Taniguchi’s addition. Many feel that the arrangement of the fourth- and fifth-floor galleries housing the permanent collection is confusing, and that the double-height second-floor galleries for contemporary art are too unwieldy. The architecture galleries, by comparison, are small and inflexible. There is no room for the medium-size exhibitions that were a staple of the architecture and design department in its heyday.

The additional gallery space is a chance for MoMA to rethink many of these spaces, by reordering the sequence of its permanent collection, for example, or considering how it might resituate the contemporary galleries in the new tower and gain more space for architecture shows in the old.

But to embark on such an ambitious undertaking the museum would first have to acknowledge that its Taniguchi-designed complex has posed new challenges. In short, it would have to embrace a fearlessness that it hasn’t shown in decades.

MoMA would do well to take a cue from Ruskin, who wrote that great art, whether expressed in “words, colors or stones, does not say the same thing over and over again.”

 

Hammer Museum

A handbill about George Anderson, “The Living Skeleton,” around 1862. More Photos »

Multimedia

Extraordinary Exhibitions

 

My neighbors tossed their copies into the recycling bin.

Obviously they didn’t know about Ricky Jay. For years Mr. Jay, the sleight-of-hand artist and archivist of all sorts of eccentric entertainments, has been collecting historic equivalents of the circus broadside, some dating back to Shakespeare’s day.

These are handbills mostly, not posters: single sheets, usually printed on a letter press with lots of hyperbolic language, not much color and only sometimes a crude illustration, rarely fine ones. They trumpet horses that jump through hoops, armless dulcimer players, German strongwomen who lift anvils with their hair, contortionists, fire eaters, magicians and pig-faced ladies.

“Extraordinary Exhibitions,” here at the Hammer Museum (it’s only on until Nov. 25, so consider yourself forewarned), presents part of his collection, about 80 marvelous works. I got together with Mr. Jay the other day. He was eager to show me some prints related to Mathew Buchinger, “The Little Man of Nuremberg,” who grew to 29 inches, married four times, fathered 14 children before he died, in his mid-60s, in 1739, and became famous for his exhibitions of conjuring, swordplay, dancing, and the playing of various musical instruments. Buchinger had no arms or legs.

He drew too: incredible micrographic pictures, visible only through a magnifying glass. Mr. Jay owns Buchinger’s great self-portrait with the Psalms and the Lord’s Prayer written into the curls of his hair. “I am not amazed that people kept remarkable samples of Buchinger’s calligraphy and microscopy, ” Mr. Jay said — neither was I — “but I am surprised that small, undistinguished announcements of his appearances at fairground booths and rooms in public houses also survived.”

He was talking about the plain handbills, advertising Buchinger and others; like nearly everything in the show they weren’t supposed to last longer than what they ballyhooed. Mr. Jay calls them the “Thai menus of their day.”

But the handbills must have been appreciated, or else they landed by mistake in a pile on someone’s desk or inside someone’s library, as bookmarks, avoiding leaky roofs, small children with soiled hands and generations of tidy owners, to transmute into prized artifacts that passed to the antiquarian market, from which Mr. Jay, a century or two or three after they were printed, acquired them.

And now they’ve landed in an art museum.

Art works that way. It can turn up, unexpectedly, and once you see it, you can’t imagine how you missed it in the first place. The art is there in the worn, throwaway sheets, dog-eared or tattooed with the rusty imprints of paper clips. It’s in the typefaces, varied to catch your eye, and in the wacky texts, which interest Mr. Jay, “as much, if not more, than illustrations,” he said. “As I think of it now, I like either the classically elegant or the downright peculiar. That’s what you would see in my house: a black-and-white stone lithograph of Barnum, so delicate most people think it is a pencil drawing, in between an 18th-century unillustrated playbill of a ‘teritoepiest painter’ capable of rendering a picture in under two minutes of a subject mentally chosen by a spectator, and an image of a juggler balancing a piano on his head while playing a trumpet.”

Akin to that last one, there’s an 18th-century broadside here, an illustration for Duncan MacDonald, a Scottish slack-wire walker. He is on the wire, wearing stilts, balancing on his right toe, a wheel supporting a plate sustaining a rack of 16 wine glasses holding up a globe that props up a piece of straw. At the same time he plays the trumpet and the French horn, while two eggs rest atop the hilt of a sword, whose tip is poised on his nose. Also, a dog perches on a chair that MacDonald balances on his left forefinger. Beneath him spikes replace a safety net.

It’s hokum, no doubt, and the handbill may even have been some Scottish piece of anti-Jacobean propaganda, not an actual advertisement for a real performer, as Mr. Jay mentions in the show’s accompanying book. But, whatever, it’s glorious, and an example of another sort of art: the art of salesmanship.

Extraordinary Exhibitions Part of the attraction of these printed curiosities, after all, stems from the sheer chutzpah of their hucksterism. Any idiot can sell a quality product that people need at a reasonable price. But try passing off tickets for a singing mouse or for an enormous head (“18 feet in Length, 7 Feet in Breadth, and Weighing 1700 Pounds”), or for Joice Heth, age 161, now a “living skeleton,” weighing 46 pounds, once nurse to infant George Washington, or so the handbill, from 1835 claims. Surely patrons went to such entertainments not because they were more gullible than we are (considering what our politicians have been selling us, how could they be?), but because they wanted to judge for themselves the quality of the con. Salesmanship, in its extreme form, is a sleight of hand, a trick, whereby people are persuaded, to buy in cash or just mentally speaking, what is patently not true and unbelievable.

Art is also about what’s inexplicable and out of the ordinary. Painting is the world’s oldest conjuring act, colored dirt smeared on a flat surface to create an illusion. We may know it’s not real, but we still enjoy seeing how the magic is done.

“Yes, yes, yes!” Mr. Jay said, about that analogy. From Buchinger to the Chinese circus, clearly nothing changes, except maybe the refinement of the handbill. Life was just as rich and perverse centuries ago, and people delighted in the bizarre and subversive, just as we do. It’s history that sanitizes the past, makes order out of chaos.

But art — whether it’s the mnemonic art of Rabbi Hirsch Dänemark, remembered in the show via a 19th-century German handbill, beautifully printed in Fraktur typefaces on luxurious mold-made paper, or whether it’s the art of those ancient pornographers who left naughty mosaics at Pompeii — reminds us that the world has always been messy, weird and wonderful.

“I like to show artist and designer friends Buchinger’s work,” Mr. Jay said. He covers the name while they look. Then, “after they rave, I remove my hand so they can read the tag: ‘Drawn by me, Mathew Buchinger, without hands or arms.’”

Presto!

“Berlin-New York Dialogues” includes a photo-map of Berlin.

The art world continued its shopping spree last night at Sotheby’s, where contemporary-art collectors and dealers dropped a cool $315.9 million — a record auction total for Sotheby’s — on everything from a sculpture of a bright red heart to a somber painting of a bullfight to an image of an electric chair. Related 

The two-hour bonanza seemed to build on the froth of Christie’s postwar and contemporary sale Tuesday night, which brought in $325 million. Of the 71 lots offered at Sotheby’s, only 6 failed to sell. “On Tuesday night, people didn’t know what to expect,” Philippe Ségalot, a Manhattan dealer who bought several works for three different clients, said at Sotheby’s. “But tonight the mood was far better.”

The auction was punctuated by two standout paintings by Francis Bacon in which Sotheby’s had invested some $60 million in guarantees. (A guarantee is a sum that the auction house promises to the seller regardless of a sale’s outcome.) It was a gamble, but it paid off.

“Second Version of Study for Bullfight No. 1” (1969), on a theme that Bacon was obsessed with, was the evening’s most expensive painting, selling for $45.9 million.

Four bidders went for the bullfight painting, and the victor was Mr. Ségalot. He said later that he was bidding on behalf of an American client whom he declined to name.

Sotheby’s had predicted that the canvas would go for about $35 million, although it did not provide an official sales estimate in the catalog.

Bidding was just as intense for a 1969 Bacon self-portrait in which the artist rendered his face in a swirling mix of bone and sinew, with haunting deep-set eyes. Like “Bullfight,” that painting did not carry a printed estimate, although experts said that they expected the self-portrait to bring $15 million to $20 million.

Three telephone bidders ended up competing with one another until Oliver Barker, a Sotheby’s expert, bought the painting for $33 million. (All that was revealed about the buyer was his paddle number, L0010.)

“Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold)” a monumental bright red sculpture by Jeff Koons that adorned the cover of Sotheby’s auction catalog, went for $23.5 million.

One of five versions by the artist, each in a different color, it was being sold by the Manhattan collector Adam Lindeman. Sotheby’s had estimated it would bring $15 million to $20 million; the hammer price without premium was $21 million.

The Manhattan dealer Larry Gagosian beat four other contenders, paying $23.5 million with Sotheby’s commission and breaking the record price for the artist, set the previous evening.

Mr. Gagosian represents Mr. Koons, and on Tuesday night at Christie’s, he bought Mr. Koons’s giant sculpture “Blue Diamond” for $11.8 million. It was not known whether he was acting for a client or buying for his own gallery stock in either purchase.

One of the evening’s biggest consigners was Helyn D. Goldenberg, a Chicago representative for Sotheby’s, and her husband, Ralph. Among the most prominent works offered by the couple was Warhol’s “Self-Portrait (Green Camouflage),” a 1986 painting in which the artist’s face is glimpsed behind a gray, green and yellow pattern.

Three bidders competed for the painting, which went to a telephone bidder for $11 million, or $12.3 million including Sotheby’s premium, after an estimate of $9 million to $12 million.

Some paintings by Rothko have brought healthy prices this week. Last night, a gray-and-black canvas by Rothko sold for $10.7 million, against its estimate of $12 million to $18 million. (The price with premium was $12 million.) The sellers were the Iowa collectors John and Mary Pappajohn, who had bought the canvas at Christie’s for $800,000 in 1996.

Sotheby’s essentially won a Rothko duel: on Tuesday night, Christie’s offered a very similar 1969 gray-and-black painting by Rothko of similar dimensions. (Both measured 60 by 68 inches.) Christie’s sold for just $9.5 million, or $10.6 million including premium.

This was also a good week for the sculptor John Chamberlain. Last night “Big E,” a twisted amalgam of painted and chromium-plated steel automobile parts from 1962, was a hot commodity. Three bidders wanted the piece, and the dealer Robert Mnuchin landed it for $4.1 million ($4.6 million with premium), well above its $3 million high estimate and a record price for the artist at auction.

Basquiats have commanded strong prices recently, too. Last night, six people went for “Untitled (Electric Chair),” a large canvas (66 by 96 1/4 inches) from 1982 of graffiti and a cartoonish figure in an executioner’s chair against a bright yellow background. Estimated at $8 million to $10 million, it was snapped up by a telephone bidder for $10.5 million, or $11.8 million with premium. An untitled Basquiat from 1981 that was being sold by Peter Brant, the Greenwich, Conn., publisher, was estimated at $7 million to $9 million. A telephone bidder bought it for $6.9 million, or $7.7 million including Sotheby’s commissions.

Ellsworth Kelly’s work only occasionally comes to auction, and last night his “Spectrum VI,” a group of 13 single-color canvases arranged in a horizontal row, was on offer. Three people went after it, and it sold for $4.6 million, or $5.1 million with commission, marginally above its low estimate. Still, it was a record price for the artist.

This season, Chinese artists have made their way into the huge contemporary art auctions rather than being ghettoized in Asian art sales. Many fetched record prices last night. Zhang Xiaogang’s “Family Portrait,” a figurative work from his “Bloodline Series” inspired by 1920s photographs, brought $4.4 million ($4.9 million including premium), well above its $2.5 million to $3.5 million estimate.

After the sale, Sotheby’s staff members could not conceal their euphoria, especially after a poor showing at its Impressionist and modern art sale last week and a plunge in its stock price.

Looking relieved, Tobias Meyer, the evening’s auctioneer and director of its contemporary art department worldwide, said, “There was high-quality hunger from a global community.”

The government of Abu Dhabi will oversee acquisitions for the new Guggenheim museum in the United Arab Emirates, officials announced yesterday.

“There is not going to be an independent entity that programs in the name of the Guggenheim,” Thomas Krens, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York, said of the Abu Dhabi branch. “At the same time, the Guggenheim doesn’t have carte blanche.”

The new museum, designed by the architect Frank Gehry, is to be built on Saadiyat Island, adjacent to the main island of the city of Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates.

A committee appointed by Abu Dhabi’s government will administer acquisitions and commissions with the aim of building a collection of modern and contemporary art for the museum, officials said. But professionals from the Guggenheim in New York will make recommendations, the two sides said.

In an interview, Mr. Krens said he was comfortable with this arrangement, which resembles the museum’s pact with the Guggenheim branch in Bilbao, Spain.

The details emerged as executives from the United Arab Emirates and the Guggenheim Foundation laid out a 15-year operating agreement yesterday that will take effect in five years, after design and construction.

The accord provides for a joint administrative and program organization to oversee the museum and a staff of 250 to 300 people, including United Arab Emirates citizens who would receive mentorship and training.

“It’s a significant step,” Mr. Krens said. “It’s analogous to the operating agreement that we did in Bilbao. It makes it real.”

It was in large part the Guggenheim’s success with its Gehry-designed branch in Bilbao, which opened in 1997, that made Abu Dhabi want to team up with the museum, Sheik Sultan bin Tahnoon al-Nahyan, chairman of the United Arab Emirates’ tourist and development authority, said in an interview. “We decided to go with an internationally well-known institution in modern art.” The Guggenheim in New York will recommend acquisitions. The contract — which may be renewed in 2027 — calls for a special exhibitions program with shows developed for the museum, exhibitions of recognized masterpieces and shows featuring regional artists and trends.

The museum will have an educational program for Abu Dhabi schools and universities and open an office on Hudson Street in Manhattan. “The development of people is a priority for our government agenda and culture is an integral part of the educational process,” Sheik Sultan said.

The 450,000-square-foot museum is to be part of the Saadiyat Island Cultural District, a square-mile complex just off the shore of Abu Dhabi island. The district comprises four museums, including the Louvre Abu Dhabi designed by Jean Nouvel, a maritime museum designed by Tadao Ando and a performing-arts center designed by Zaha Hadid.

“We are determined to create a visual statement for our visitors,” Sheik Sultan said. “We want to create buildings that will last for many generations to come.”

“Yes, it’s me,” Mr. Yue said in a recent interview, and he smiled, though in a gentler, less face-splitting fashion than the man in his paintings — the one who drifts Zelig-like past various familiar backgrounds making a sardonic, or perhaps ironically despairing, comment on the passing scene.

Mr. Yue, 45, was in New York in October for the opening of an exhibition of his paintings and sculptures that continues through Jan. 6 at the Queens Museum of Art. The show, “Yue Minjun and the Symbolic Smile,” is the first American museum exhibition of Mr. Yue’s work and further evidence of his remarkable rise in the superheated field of Chinese contemporary art.

A few years ago, Mr. Yue was eking out a precarious existence in one of Beijing’s artist colonies, trying to figure out a way to weave China’s tumultuous experience into his works. Now, largely on the strength of that signature grin, he has achieved stardom internationally.

Most conspicuously, one of his paintings, “Execution” (1995), a satirical Pop Art-like version of Manet’s “Execution of Maximilian” that was inspired by the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, sold for $5.9 million last month at an auction at Sotheby’s in London. It was a record sum for a contemporary Chinese painting. For Mr. Yue, the huge sums suddenly commanded by his works — “The Pope” (1997), depicting him as a prelate, went for $4.3 million in June — have involved a readjustment.

“I never thought about this in the past,” he said. “What was important to me was the creation part of painting. But it seems that something has changed. Maybe it’s the way money is becoming more important in society.”

He is not always comfortable with how his work is analyzed. The mesmerizing enigma of that reddish face painted over and over again, with the wide laugh and the eyes tightly shut from the hilarious strain, is subject to a multitude of interpretations. One Chinese art critic has identified the artist as a member of what he calls the school of “cynical realism,” though Mr. Yue doesn’t feel that he belongs to a school or movement and he doesn’t think he’s cynical.

“I’m actually trying to make sense of the world,” he said. “There’s nothing cynical or absurd in what I do.”

Mr. Yue was born in 1962 in the far northern Heilongjiang Province of China and as a child moved to Beijing with his parents. He studied oil painting at the Hebei Normal University and graduated in 1989, when China was rocked by student-led demonstrations and their suppression on Tiananmen Square in June of that year.

“My mood changed at that time,” he said. “I was very down. I realized the gap between reality and the ideal, and I wanted to create my own artistic definition, whereby there could be a meeting with social life and the social environment.”

“The first step,” he added, “was to create a style to express my feelings accurately, starting with something that I knew really well —myself.” That was the first step toward forging what has become the image that has now made him famous. The second step was to devise the laugh, which, he said, was inspired by a painting he saw by another Chinese artist, Geng Jianyi, in which a smile is deformed to mean the opposite of what it normally means.

“So I developed this painting where you see someone laughing,” he said. “At first you think he’s happy, but when you look more carefully, there’s something else there.”

“A smile,” Mr. Yue said, “doesn’t necessarily mean happiness; it could be something else.”

The smile has been variously interpreted as a sort of joke at the absurdity of it all, or the illusion of happiness in lives inevitably heading toward extinction.

Karen Smith, a Beijing expert on Chinese art, suggests that Mr. Yue’s grin is a mask for real feelings of helplessness.

“In China there’s a long history of the smile,” Mr. Yue said. “There is the Maitreya Buddha who can tell the future and whose facial expression is a laugh. Normally there’s an inscription saying that you should be optimistic and laugh in the face of reality.”

“There were also paintings during the Cultural Revolution period, those Soviet-style posters showing happy people laughing,” he continued. “But what’s interesting is that normally what you see in those posters is the opposite of reality.”

Mr. Yue said his smile was in a way a parody of those posters. But, since it’s a self-portrait, it’s also necessarily a parody of himself, he added.

“I’m not laughing at anybody else, because once you laugh at others, you’ll run into trouble, and can create obstacles,” he said. “This is the way to do it if you want to make a parody of the things that are behind the image.”

The real reason he paints himself is that it gives him a greater margin for freedom of expression, he explained.

The work at the Queens Museum ranges from a grouping of 20 life-size terra cotta soldiers, grinning versions of the famous statues unearthed years ago at the tomb of China’s first emperor, to a painting of a laughing version of himself holding another self-image aloft in front of the Statue of Liberty.

There is also a series called “Hats,” in which Mr. Yue has painted himself in all sorts of headgear, from an American football helmet to a peaked cap of a soldier in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, with that unvarying laugh on his face.

“It’s not a denial of reality but a questioning of it,” Mr. Yue said of his work in general. “And that laugh — anybody who’s gone through Chinese recent experience would understand it.”