Is there any artistic tactic more difficultthan visual humor? The artist who undertakes to be funny with images faces a dual challenge: first, to make the pictures truly amusing; second, to keep the humor from cloying. And a painter who jokes—as opposed to a live performer or even a comic-strip illustrator—must work this trick exclusively in the eye, so to speak, without the aid of extensive dialogue, plot or physical comedy. Little wonder that the form is exceedingly rare. Indeed, in the entire history of Western art, how many famous practitioners can we cite? Breughel at times, Bosch in nightmare fashion, Michelangelo in odd sectors of the Last Judgment, Hals and other Dutch masters in a jovial mood, Duchamp in conceptually rich works like L.H.O.O.Q. (his bearded Mona Lisa) and Fountain (his inverted urinal), many other artists once or twice, in some small part of their compositions, in passing. But who, among the classic names, has made humor their staple? Archimboldo, Hogarth, Daumier, Magritte—perhaps only these are full-time humorists of a high artistic order. An emotional slip,a lapse of taste, and one descends immediately into the sentimental realm of genre-scene painters and Norman Rockwell.

Thus it is no contradiction to say that the former-USSR artist Anton Kandinsky treats every subject as joke, and every joke as a fundamentally serious matter. Born in Crimea, Ukraine, in 1960, he studied at the Simferopol Art College and the Ukrainian Academy of Arts, from which he obtained his MFA in 1986. His rigorous training in old-style academic naturalism enables the artist to create convincing figures and compelling likenesses at will, a technique central to his deadpan approach. Probably of equal import is the fact that Kandinsky was a teenager during the 1970s, when Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid were developing their tongue-in-cheek Sots Art, with its doubly satiric blend of Socialist Realism and Western Pop Art. In 1998, Kandinsky moved to U.S., where he became friends with the now émigré Melamid (who had by then split from Komar). Since 2007, Kandinsky has occupied a studio next to that of the relentless avant-garde prankster. The two artists speak daily over the dividing partial wall, visit each other’s spaces, comment on each other’s work, ad lib endlessly, occasionally collaborate, and sometimes participate in the same group shows.

It took several years for Kandinsky to accept as esthetically valid the pop sensibility and technical crudity of much contemporary Western art. Once he did, he soon became aware of a kindred development elsewhere in the world that was having phenomenal international success. Contemporary Chinese artists shared much with Kandinsky and his Soviet-born peers. Their huge, multi-ethnic country, too, had suffered unimaginably in the WWII era, had stultified culturally and economically under authoritarian rule for decades, and then had undergone a startling liberation from hard-line Communist ideology. In both nations, an insouciant artistic experimentation followed the demise of Social Realism. But whereas Russian artists, after a brief post-1989 efflorescence, receded into relative obscurity on the global market, experimental Chinese artists were enjoying an astonishing spike in notoriety and prices in the 2004-08 period. Even American artists, accustomed to critical and financial dominance since 1945, suddenly felt an unsettling envy for their brethren in the People’s Republic.

the new international dynamic through character match-ups in which Western art figures (Chuck Close, Kandinsky himself) are paired with Chinese art stars (Ai Weiwei, Yue Minjun) between text banners reading “I don’t want to be an American [or Russian] artist / I want to be a Chinese artist.”

Certainly humor has played a major role in the work of China’s first post-Mao avant-gardists. In addition to Ai and Yue, artists such as Fang Lijun, Li Shan, Sui Jianguo, Wang Guangyi, Zeng Fanzhi, Cang Xin, and Zhang Hongtu make abundant use of mirth, tapping into a Chinese tradition that recognizes (in addition to the pure frivolity and satiric mockery familiar in the West) a deeper, more spiritual dimension to comedy: the simultaneously life-affirming and world-transcending joviality of the Laughing Buddha—the purified soul who, in his wisdom, can contemplate earthly foibles with a bemused indulgence.

authority. In the age of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, the lust for art-world fame and riches has become an open secret. Yet Kandinsky gleefully exposes a more ominous impulse: socially “progressive” artists’ fierce, though publicly unacknowledged, will-to-power. In a 2009 painting, he depicts today’s esthetic paragon, Andy Warhol, gazing not at a superstar Chinese artist but at the man who long held life-and-death sway over hundreds of millions of souls. “I want to be Mao Zedong,” reads the thought strip. Is this merely a bid for cultural immortality, or a longing for true dictatorial absolutism? In either case, there can be no doubt that Kandinsky fully realizes the murderous potency of Mao: in a work from the same year, he has the USSR’s bloodiest tyrant project a similarly envious sentiment: “I don’t want to be Joseph Stalin / I want to be Mao Zedong.”

disconcertingly, massed or patterned into basic structural elements: the stripes of a flag or the framing device for the “reflection” of Picasso’s Guernica.

Why this repeated association between jewels and combat? One simple answer is that greed for resources and wealth has always been a prime motivation for war, even when disguised—consider present U.S. actions in the oil-rich Middle East—as a selfless drive to liberate. (Kandinsky’s studies of American troops in desert terrain turn an antiterrorist slogan back on itself: “If you see something,” the inscription reads, “say something.” Apparently what the artist sees, and here obliquely portrays, is hypocrisy.) Less immediately striking, but more intellectually refined, is the treatment of gems, in their esthetic purity, as visual counterbalances to the low, mad instincts that prompt endless mayhem. Every Kandinsky jewel is a gleaming joke on human nature—lampooning its grossness while merrily inspiring its self-transformation.