From the thick scrolls of incense in a Buddhist temple in China to the prestigious walls of the Louvre Museum, the artist Yan Pei Ming's itinerary, from his native east to his adoptive West, follows the path of the sun.
Mao's Chinese cultural revolution is the intellectual horizon in which Yan Pei Ming spends the first twenty years of his life, in a Shanghai where no building still scratches the foggy skies of the city. But by enrolling at the School of Fine Arts in Dijon in 1980, the artist exceeds this horizon to shine in others latitudes.
The stereotypical iconography of the Great Helmsman on which his first brushes have worn out quickly gives way to portraits in black and white made in the dazzling new gesture, how liberating.
Yan Pei Ming (born in 1960)
The sweetest man (the father of the artist) 1996
Estimate : 40 000 / 60 000 €
The sweetest man (the father of the artist), created in 1996, is part of a large series of portraits dedicated to his father and whose titles all follow the same pattern: The most stubborn man, The wisest man or The most powerful man acquired in 1997 by FRAC Auvergne. This ubiquitous figure of a father often defined as a stranger is reminiscent of the iconic portrait of Mao, the official vehicle of the despot's politics. In this piece offered for sale by PIASA, despite the width of the brush strokes on the surface of the canvas, the facial features reveal with a rare delicacy the expression of the model.
The painter navigates between the influences of history of art and the evocative power of a news where, more and more, images triumphs over the text. From John Paul II to Michael Jackson to Bruce Lee or Barack Obama, the artist becomes an archaeologist of the present.
Between the ambitious dialogue "Yan Pei-Ming against Courbet" organized by the Courbet Museum in Ornans until September 30 and the exhibition "The Man Who Cry" at the Museum of Fine Arts in Dijon until September 23 it is not easy in this year 2019 to miss the Chinese painter.
