YAN PEI-MING’S PERSONAL EXHIBIT AT THE GAMeC

January 2009
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Written by Elena Lanzanova April 1 2008

Category :Exhibition
Tags: Yan Pei-Ming, Still

Article translated by Amritee Mahabir

The GAMeC – The Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bergamo– will present the exhibit “Yan Pei-Ming with Yan Pei-Ming” until 27^th July 2008. It is his first solo exhibit in an Italian museum dedicated to this Chinese artist, one of the greatest protagonists on the contemporary art scene and an internationally recognised figure. The event is curated by Giacinto di Pietrantonio and gathers twenty large format works including many watercolours, the majority of which is going on public show for the first time. It doesn’t offer a retrospective look but is a journey of planned works selected by Pei-Ming and the curator organised into four themed sections: Self-portrait with Landscape, Self-portrait with Religion, Self-portrait with Relatives and Self-portrait with Life and Death. As Giacinto di Pietrantonio explains, there were several reasons for which the exhibit is entitled “Yan Pei-Ming with Yan Pei-Ming”, but the main reason is because he thought that each work is a self-portrait of the artist even when it is not presented as such, given that the author relates each piece back to himself making his own identity coincide with his personal idea of humanity. The title itself evokes the main theme of the retrospective, the self-portrait, presented in each room and in continuous dialogue with the other subjects displayed. This choice emerged from the consideration that each work is in some way, a self-portrait of its artist even when it does not directly depict him or her, as it is a representation of the artist. Yan Pei-Ming introduces the theme of self-portraits in 2000, and this moment was a sort of watershed for the curator from which he could travel on an artistic journey backwards and forwards in time before and after the year zero.

Another important aspect of the exhibition is the technique the artist uses - painting - which contains within itself a reference to classicism and antiquity. In fact, his painting makes heavy use of matter and is produced using violent brushwork, thus representing a bridge between the East, and the West. The large oil canvases with which the artist has made a name for himself on the international scene – in fact are made using a Western technique that the artist paints only in his studio in Dijon. His watercolours, on the other hand, which he only creates when he is in Shanghai, draw on the pictorial tradition of the East. In both cases his painting never makes reference to a precise geographical location but becomes synonymous with atemporality and non-place: East and West combined in a mixture of styles, elements and subjects.

During the film Ming, artiste brigand by French director Michel Quinejure documents Pei-Ming’s working method: vibrant brushstrokes against the canvas and a discipline that includes an obsession with series: the repetition of the subject, the use of monochrome, and a series of self-imposed time constrictions that bring his pictorial work – an intense interaction with the canvas as though it were a contest between himself and the work – close to the precepts of an oriental martial art.

Pei-Ming has imprinted his name on the international scene with his large format works that are almost monochrome in black, white or red, with recurrent images of political figures like Mao Zedong, from the cinema like Bruce Lee, or religious figures like the Pope or the Buddha making notable success in the art market.

The artist’s highest sales record goes back to last November at Sotheby’s New York where his oil painting “Mao” was given an estimate of 600-800 million dollars, and which was eventually sold for 1,609,000 dollars (equal to 1,101,527 euros). While the most recent sale is “Mao Rouge (Red Mao)” which went under the hammer at Sotheby’s London on 28^th February for 144,500 pounds (268,940 euros) against an initial value of 120-180 million pounds. In Galleries (Massimo De Carlo Gallery in Milan and the Rodolphe Janssen Gallery in Brussels) the prices of his paintings range from 50,000 to 200,000 dollars according to the dimensions of the canvass.

Yan Pei-Ming is a rare artist on the secondary market, who doesn’t come from the generation of Chinese painters that today make amazing sales at auction because he chose to leave China at the start of the eighties and to study in France where he still lives and works till today. His market is especially French oriented and his paintings are particularly in the Dijon, Besançon and Geneva museums.

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