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Lot Essay
Shanghai-born artist Yan Pei Ming moved to France to study at the Dijon Art Academy and has been based there ever since. He has exhibited extensively in Europe and internationally, and held his first exhibition in mainland China in 2005 with his Homage to my Father at the Shanghai Art Museum. His works are instantly recognizable: large-scale, monochromatic and imposing portraits of individual faces, their lugubrious features typically confronting the viewer with an expressionless and somewhat distant gaze. These paintings are occasionally self-portraits, representations of such icons as Mao Zedong, Bruce Lee, or the Buddha, or the artist may also chose victims of disasters or simply strangers.
Yan's technique fuses his Western training with distinct elements of traditional Chinese concepts of creativity and experimentation. His works on paper reveal the influence of his classical training in his modeled approach to portraiture and to the figure. At the same time, he uses long-handled and extraordinarily wide brushes, incorporating a greater level of chance to his technique. These self-imposed limitations upon his technique allow for maximum visual effect. The subject's individual features are clearest at a distance, but up close disappear into a surging, moody abstraction. The figures are always depicted alone in a minimally defined space, unmarked by history or culture. The range of subjects in Yan's ouevre collectively represent the artist's own insight into identity and fate - as something both profoundly individual and yet hopelessly interchangeable - and for the possible representations of contemporary Chinese identity as an expatriate living in Paris.
Yan's technique fuses his Western training with distinct elements of traditional Chinese concepts of creativity and experimentation. His works on paper reveal the influence of his classical training in his modeled approach to portraiture and to the figure. At the same time, he uses long-handled and extraordinarily wide brushes, incorporating a greater level of chance to his technique. These self-imposed limitations upon his technique allow for maximum visual effect. The subject's individual features are clearest at a distance, but up close disappear into a surging, moody abstraction. The figures are always depicted alone in a minimally defined space, unmarked by history or culture. The range of subjects in Yan's ouevre collectively represent the artist's own insight into identity and fate - as something both profoundly individual and yet hopelessly interchangeable - and for the possible representations of contemporary Chinese identity as an expatriate living in Paris.