Sometimes short phrases suggest vast hinterlands of meaning. Such is the case with the title of a novel, Compulsory Happiness, by Norman Manea, a Rumanian writer now living in the United States. Happiness, of course, cannot be coerced: though expressions of it most certainly can. Manea’s title, then, perfectly captures the absurdity and menace of Ceaușescu’s Rumania: First destroy the possibility of human happiness and then make everyone smile, laugh, and proclaim their joy under threat of punishment if they refuse to do so. There is no better way for a dictator to subdue his people, to debase them and make them despise themselves.

The Chinese artist Yue Minjun, who has just had his first European exhibition in Paris at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, has made the smile and the laugh his special subject, just as the still-life painter of the Dutch Golden Age Adriaan Coorte made the gooseberry and the asparagus his.

Yue Minjun was born in 1962 and therefore came to consciousness during the Cultural Revolution; he was adolescent when it was still a very raw memory and when, given China’s recent history, the liberalization might still have seemed a cunning trap to catch the unwary and the ideologically unsound. It is hardly surprising that he came to see facial expression not as a window on thought and feeling but as a mask for them, a mask to