Yan Pei-Ming

Yan Pei-Ming - Painting in honour of the revolutionary leader

Yan Pei-Ming was born in Shanghai on 1st December 1960. His childhood was characterised and overshadowed by the Great Cultural Revolution in China and its bloody murders, and Yan Pei-Ming found distraction and fulfilment early on in the visual arts, picking up drawing and painting at the age of 13. His talent was recognised by his teachers at school and put at the service of political propaganda: Pei-Ming had to put Mao Zedong and the Red Guard in the right image as desired by those in power. Despite these dubious early successes, the young artist's future path initially proved rocky as his aspirations to attend the art academy in Shanghai failed due to Pei-Ming's speech impediment of stuttering. An uncle in Paris offered to help, but the Paris Academy did not want to accept Yan Pei-Ming either. While earning his living as a dishwasher in a restaurant, he learnt French and tried to gain admission to the École des Beaux-Arts in Dijon.

Worldwide fame through portraits and paraphrases

Yan Pei-Ming completed his studies in 1987 and that same year began his large-format portraits, which are still characteristic of his work today, as he continues to develop them. His favourite subject was initially a familiar motif from his past, that of Mao Zedong, and Pei-Ming was able to present these pictures in his first solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1991. Portraits remained the dominant theme in Pei-Ming's art for the next few years, to be joined by other public figures such as Bruce Lee, Barack Obama, Dominique de Villepin and the Pope. The artist developed a certain fascination for popes, which manifested itself in his repeated use of the subject and culminated in a three-part self-portrait of the artist as a pope in prayer, surrounded by believers in everyday clothes. Pei-Ming often juxtaposed the celebrities with portraits of the lower social classes such as homeless people, prostitutes, prisoners. More recently, he has increasingly created new interpretations of classical masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci, Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Goya.

Art has its own truth

Yan Pei-Ming sees his painting as a truth of its own that is neither false nor true. He interweaves his own biography with myth and politics, drawing new lines of interpretation that move in a fascinating contrast between figuration and abstraction, between antiquity and modernity. Past and present are in constant dialogue in Pei-Ming’s work, which merge into a new creative hypothesis. In 2021, the exhibition Au nom du père, (In the name of the father), at the Museum Unterlinden in Colmar, enabled an exciting journey through the artist's life and work, tracing an arc from his childhood to the coronavirus pandemic. Au nom du père alludes to the imprint that Yan Pei-Ming's life received through father figures in particular: firstly his biological father and then the political father of modern China - Mao Zedong.

Yan Pei-Ming lives and works in Dijon and Paris.