YAN PEI-MING

Buddha and his warriors

April 11- May 18, 2002

Yan Pei-Ming was born in Shanghai in 1960 where as a gifted adolescent he was commissioned to do some propaganda frescoes with portraits of the popular heroes of the Cultural Revolution. Arriving in France, as a refugee, at the beginning of the 80’s, he enters the School of Fine arts in Dijon and he starts painting 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 executed with the harsh, expressionistic method which was to become his trademark.

His work oscillates between expressionism (as far as technique is concerned) and a repetition (related to the subject matter) which is all that expressionism is not. For Ming the process of painting itself is of great importance: he confronts the canvas and attacks it with aggressive brushstrokes. Yet, his action of attack has
little to do with the influences from historic figures like Pollock: his works have classical formal and stylistic qualities: composition, balance, shadows.

The monochromatic portraits of Yan Pei Ming, in contrast with the common notion regarding portraits, they do not represent nor reveal the identity of the sitter, do not contribute in any way to the identification of subjectivity. By repeating the same themes (i.e. portraits of his father, Mao Zedong, and now Buddha) 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.

Ming himself explains his use of series, repetition and variation with a reference to sculptures of Buddha:
“in the big Chinese temples there is arrom devoted to five hundred human-size Buddhas carved in wood. Although at first glance they all look the same, each effigy is different and personalized, but without being a portrait”.

Ming’s work struggles with the paradox between the reality of juman life and the ideal, between humanity as an ideal notion and impossibilities of the individual as a free subjectivity. 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.

In the exhibition titled “Buddha and his warriors” the artist will present apart from paintings, carcoal drawings and sculptures.