By Nick Muzyczka

Yue Minjun's reworked version of Seizing the Presidential Palace. Photos: Courtesy of Shanghai Gallery of Art

The Shanghai Gallery of Art, located on the third floor of Three on the Bund, is currently displaying works by Yue Minjun, one of China's most successful artists. Most famous for his smiling-faces pictures, which have dominated his output and now sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, Yue here reveals a new side to his work.

The premise is relatively simple; the artist paints a version of well-known, large-scale oil paintings from West and East, removing the human figures. The exhibition raises questions on a number of different levels, asking the viewer to think about collective memories, subjective reality and idolatry.

"Yue forces the audience to recount times gone past, and reconstruct scenes using their own memory," said Jessie Xie, from the gallery.

Yue began painting the series in the late 1990s. The works now include versions of classic pictures like Johannes Vermeer's A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, Li Zhongjin's Take the Luding Bridge by Storm, Chen Yanning's Chairman Mao Visits Canton Countryside, and Chen Yifei and Wei Jingshan's Seizing the Presidential Palace.

The conspicuous absence of Mao from Chairman Mao Visits Canton Countryside creates a gnawing awareness of contingency in the viewer. Here, we are not just asked to think about the permanence of natural, irreducible forms and the impermanence of idols, heroes and ideologies, but also about the fact that everyone must re-create the scene in their minds - a process which is inherently subjective and allows for the imposition of disparate moods and thoughts onto the same work.

That Yue also has some skill as a reproducer is evident in Seizing the Presidential Palace, which contains a beautifully vivid version of the original turret, minus the hordes of celebrating soldiers. The red flag does remain, however, wafting aimlessly in the wind - a symbolic object whose previously definite meaning now appears up for grabs.

There is something gentle and thoughtful about this exhibition that is in sharp contrast to Yue's smiling self-portraits, which can often be brash and confrontational. It nevertheless remains a challenging series, forcing conceptual engagement in a way that much contemporary art does not manage.

Writing in 2004, Yue said: "I believe that artists create their own unique style by manipulat-ing their artworks each in an individual way. As for me, I abstract this concept of manipulation and exaggerate the method of manipulation in my paintings."

The exhibition does relate to Yue's earlier projects in the sense that it is held together by one dominant theme.

After spending some time looking at Seizing the Presidential Palace, there are no further questions raised by additional pieces, so the inclusion of one or two weaker pictures (from a technical point of view), such as Yue's Gabrielle d'Estrées And One Of Her Sisters is a questionable curatorial decision.

Date: Until May 23, 11 am-9 pm

Venue: Shanghai Gallery of Art, Three on the Bund, 3/F, 3 Zhongshan Road E1

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Call 6321-5757 for details

Admission: Free

Chen Yifei and Wei Jingshan's original Seizing the Presidential Palace.