Yan Pei-Ming

Studio Massimo de Carlo, Milan
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Milan, Studio Massimo de Carlo, Tête de Vertu, Yan Pei-Ming, 2000

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly brighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is very slight canvas draw towards the top two corners and a minor stable crack to the extreme upper left edge. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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Yan Pei Ming's Buddha from 2000 is a work of immense and intense painterly presence. Massive in size, the scale is all the more striking because of the close cropping of the face which emphasises the magnificence of the Buddhist icon. Born and raised in China in a Buddhist household, the spiritual figurehead is a natural choice for Ming who is always drawn to depict sitters who exude strength and radiate energy. There is a taciturn yet seismic spiritual ardour which resonates from this image of the Buddha, eyes closed in contemplation, fixed in meditation at the moment of enlightenment. In Ming's larger than life format, the paint applied thickly with great swathes of impasto, he seemingly bursts through the surface of the canvas. Reduced to a palette of grey and white, he is reminiscent of one of the five giant Buddha statues in China, such as that at Leshan, Sichuan province. Dating from the Tang dynasty, it is carved out of the cliff face and is the tallest Buddha in the world. Just as that work was carved, sculpted from the rock face in 713 AD, so here Ming uses paint thickly to sculpt the painted surface, applying layer after layer of sinuous pigment. Rather like the British artist Frank Auerbach, whose work Ming admires, he works directly and spontaneously applying drama-laden strokes. His is a painting characterised by intuition, expression and emotion. Exploiting the forceful contrasts of bi-chromatic painting, the platonic face of the Buddha emerges from the magma of brushstrokes. Instantly legible from a distance, as the viewer approaches the distinguishing features meld into a vast expanse of black, white and grey. Smoothly painted passages, such as the eyelids, contrast with the densely worked areas like the nose and left cheek, which stand out in relief against the flatter areas. Throughout, the composition is punctuated by black drips of paint, which evince the frenzy of Ming's painterly process and strangely resemble the erosion and natural deterioration that has transformed and blackened the giant outdoor icons over the centuries. 

 

Following in a long tradition of Western artists, starting with Gerhard Richter in the 1960s, Ming works predominantly from photographs. Unlike the German artist, however, he does not work directly from the source image but instead commits it to memory prior to commencing the painting. This liberates him further from the shackles of representation, allowing the work to come into being in a purely unrestrained manner. Like Richter's 'Mountainscapes' and 'Cityscapes' from the late 1960s, the clarity of the image glimpsed from afar disintegrates into a luscious mesh of viscous marks, offering continual reward as the viewer approaches the canvas. Probing the very structures of painting, Ming, like Richter, reveals in his painting the specific approaches concealed within old traditions with entirely innovative visual formulations. Having left China in the 1980s and spending over a decade without retuning to his homeland, Ming's work is infused with this distinctly European sensibility. Yet in Buddha, one of his most explicitly Eastern motifs, this is brought to bear on an image of the devotional figure intrinsic to his upbringing, nationhood and psychological build-up. For this reason, the Buddha is one of the most insightful of Ming's repertoire of subjects.