Yan Pei-Ming (born 1960, Shanghai, China) was the second of four children. He grew up during the Cultural Revolution and started to paint in his spare time. He showed promise as a painter at a young age, excelling in art studies in secondary school. As per the rules of the new regime, he was required to attend propaganda classes wherein students with exceptional drawing skills were obliged to make posters of their communist leader Mao Zedong and his Red Guards. He applied for admission to the Shanghai Art & Design School but was rejected due to his stutter. In 1980 he left Shanghai for France, where he enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts, graduating in 1999. Yan Pei-Ming creates large-scale works depicting real and imaginary people. Yan’s portraits, typically mono- or bi-chromatic, often verge on abstraction, with broad, patterned brushstrokes and drips of paint. He is perhaps best known for his monumental self-portraits, including Double (Selfportrait at the Morgue), 2006, a watercolor of the artist as a dead man, as well as his eight-foot-tall portraits of Mao Zedong, Bruce Lee, his father and, more recently, Barack Obama. Often executed in expressions of mourning or sorrow, the portraits encompass a combination of Eastern and Western influences.

Yan Pei-Ming

Drawing from European portraiture traditions, Yan Pei-Ming creates large-scale paintings that depict international celebrities including politicians, popes, and actors—or the artist himself.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Yan_Pei-Ming_Icons_2013_Content_Sheet_UPDATED_2024.pdf

Yan Pei-Ming’s epic size monochromatic paintings have redefined the traditional parameter of portraiture. Often depicting Mao Zedong, Bruce Lee, his father, and other cultural icons, these portraits are, in reality, brilliant encapsulations of historical traces and personal sentiments endeared to the artist

The monumental scale of the portraits has reinvented the mode of painting, and questioned the viewing relationship between audience and artwork, making the artist a concrete anti-thesis to the prevalent trend of conceptual works at the time. At the same time, the monochromatic color palette also proved to be a successful strategy for the artist to break free from the baggage of the Western art history. The artist believes that portraits have the power to capture and transcend experience and thoughts. It is through his paintings where personal and collective histories resurfaced.

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“ I am interested in humanity rather than individuality. „

—Yan Pei-Ming