YAN PEI-MING

Retour sur le lieu de crime

April 29 - May 22, 1999

Yan Pei-Ming was born in Shangai in 1960. He attended the Fine Art’s School of Dijon and has participated, amongst other venues, in the Venice Biennale of 1995 and the Biennale of 1997. Today he lives and works in Dijon.

Yan Pei-Ming started-off in Shangai as a gifted adolescent commissioned to do propaganda frescoes with portraits of the popular heroes of the cultural revolution. After arriving in France, at the beginning of the 80’s, he painted pale, nude and contorted bodies only to focus, since 1987, on his outsized faces and anonymous landscapes in bichrome black and white or red and white.

Combining expressionist gesture with the principle of repetition, Pei-Ming’s work oscillates between a conventional and an unknown form. By repeating the same themes as well as situating his portraits in an infinite succession, the artist intentionally reveals the perpetual juxtaposition between the singularity of his subject-matter and the collectivity of the series to which it belongs.

With titles that force the viewer to ask questions as to their creator’s intentions, Yan Pei-Ming’s works find the answer in terms of culture, tradition and modernity, remaining primarily a matter of paint.

The title of the present exhibition is ‘Returning to the scene of the crime”.