Dijon-based painter Yan Pei-Ming is known for rendering humanity's many faces in a single tone and on monumental scale, following the tradition of Western portraiture.
Read MoreBorn in Shanghai in 1960, Yan Pei-Ming grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and drew propaganda portraits of Mao Zedong and the Red Guard from a young age for classes, faces that would lay the foundation for his later work.
Yan stuttered as a child and considered painting his main way of expression. He was refused entry to Shanghai Art and Design Academy, and again at National School of Fine Arts in Paris upon moving to the city in 1980, after which he found a job as a dishwasher in Dijon, where he attended École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts until 1987.
Filling large surfaces at a quick pace, Yan captures the spirit of historical figures, political leaders, family, and self, with broad, expressive brushstrokes hinting at their humanity, while decontextualising the same personalities against atemporal, monochrome backdrops.
Yan started painting his signature monumental portraits in 1987; many centred the face of Mao, who was well-known in France and a proxy to Chinese culture. With this, Yan held his first solo exhibition at Centre Pompidou in 1991, which earned him international recognition.
Yan painted mostly in black and white, not only to stand out from artists he admired, but express pessimism toward life. Poverty, war, and death, are prominent themes across his work, which has portrayed prisoners, prostitutes, and homeless children on a large-scale.
Yan returned to China in 2005 and held his first exhibition at Shanghai Art Museum. Organised as part of China's diplomatic cultural season with France that year, the artist and his work took on the role of a bridge between the two countries.
Yan accompanied President Sarkozy to China in 2007; during the trip, he met the head of the Louvre, which led to his 2009 exhibition at the Paris museum, The Funeral of Mona Lisa. In a hallway behind the original painting, a pentaptych of portraits showed da Vinci's figure at the centre, with Yan and his father on either side, on their deathbeds.
Besides Mao and his family, Yan painted historical figures such as Napoleon and Mussolini, and politicians from Donald Trump to Putin, Bashar al-Assad, and Kim Jong-Un. Shown side by side in his 2023 exhibition at Francisco Carolinum Linz, Yan reminds viewers that any claim to monumental power is but a face within history, greying to fade with time.
As with Mona Lisa (c.1503–1519), Yan reworked historical scenes from known paintings from Édouard Manet's depiction of Emperor Maximilian's execution in Mexico to Goya's The Third of May 1808 (1814), only stripped of their original colours to striking effect.
'Portrait is like a mirror,' the artist has said, 'it reflects to us who we are, what we are.' Now ranging some hundred or so faces, Yan has said this series will continue for the rest of his life.
'By portraying world leaders and historic events with uncannily expressive realism, he turns the weight of humanity's complex impurity into a reflective mire,' Stephanie Bailey writes in Ocula Magazine on the occasion of Yan's 2023 exhibition in Florence.
In the artist's portraits, 'good and bad collapse into a mesh of actions that are as incomprehensible as they are inextricable from the human condition.'
Yan Pei-Ming is the recipient of the 2009 Medal of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.
Yan Pei Ming's work has been shown widely across Europe, Asia, the U.K., and the U.S.
Select solo exhibitions include: Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; Francisco Carolinum, Linz (both 2023); Massimo de Carlo, Milan (2022); Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris (2021); Musée d'Orsay, Paris; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon (both 2019); Belvedere Museum, Vienna (2016); David Zwirner Gallery, New York (2012); and Musée du Louvre, Paris (2009).
Selected group exhibitions include: MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome (2022); Fondation Boghossian, Brussels (2021); Asia Culture Center, Gwangju (2018); Leopold Museum, Vienna; National Portrait Gallery, London; MOCA Shanghai; Bangkok Art Biennale (all 2018); Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2013); and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2009).
Yan Pei-Ming is represented by Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/London/Salzburg/Seoul.
The artist lives and works in Dijon, France.
The artist's website can be found here.
Elaine YJ Zheng | Ocula | 2023
