Lot 155
  • 155

Yan Pei-Ming

Estimate
3,500,000 - 4,500,000 HKD
bidding is closed

Description

  • Yan Pei-Ming
  • Self Portrait
  • oil on canvas 
  • 250 by 250 cm.; 98¿ by 98¿ in.
signed in Chinese and Pinyin, titled in Chinese and French, dated 2000 on the reverse

Provenance

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

Exhibited

Denmark, Odense, Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, Selfscape: Kim Sooja & Yan Pei-ming, 12 February - 25 February, 2000 
France, Dijon, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, Yan Pei-Ming, May - September, 2003, p.1, p. 61

Literature

Yan Pei-Ming (China, Shanghai, Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House, 2005), unpaginated

Condition

This work is generally in good condition. There are occasional pinpoint accretion on the paint impasto and scuff on lower left quadrant. Having examined the work under ultraviolet light, there appears to be no evidence of restoration.
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Catalogue Note

“I am interested in humanity rather than individuality.”

A Transient Trail
Yan Pei-Ming

Yan Pei-Ming’s epic size monochromatic paintings have redefined the traditional parameter of portraiture. Having lived in France since 1980, Yan belonged to the first wave of artists to migrate overseas in the early 1980s, serving as one of the earliest artists to not only propel the rise of Chinese contemporary art outside of China, but to break into the predominantly European art scene at the time. 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. Among his works, his self-portraits are of particular importance in understanding the motif of memory and emotion that dominate Yan’s two- decade long oeuvre. Painted in 2000, Self Portrait (Lot 155) was exhibited at the artist’s first exhibition in Denmark,“Selfscape: Kim Sooja & Yan Pei-ming” at the Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, in 2000. The work is a signatory work from the early millennium period to highlight the red colour palette and more importantly, the subject matter of the self. It also belongs to one of the works produced by the artist during the introspective period before Yan embarked onto the world stage in 2003 with his exhibition “Zone of Urgency” curated by Hou Hanru in the 50th Venice Biennale. After which he would begin to shift his focus towards the broader scheme of political affairs and world events.

Having born to a lower class family in Shanghai in 1960, as a child Yan Pei-Ming always knew he must move overseas in order to break away from the ill-fated future in China, and pursue the ultimate life as an artist.After having his application rejected by the Shanghai Fine Arts Academy due to his stutter, Yan left China at the age of 19 in 1980 to join his uncle in France. Though the artist had to work in a leather bag factory in Paris for three months, he eventually moved to the town of Dijon, where he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts for five years. The trans- migratory experience proved to be pivotal in forming and shaping the eclectic artistic practice of the artist, where Chinese visual tradition and Western formal approach each finds its way onto the vast painterly surface of the canvases. As the artist boldly declares, “I am neither a French artist, nor a Chinese artist. I am an artist in the world.”1 In 1987, seven years after his arrival in France, Yan Pei-Ming began to work on a series of portraits on Mao Zedong, which garnered him unprecedented attention in the art world, becoming the third Chinese artist with works collected by Centre Georges Pompidou. 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 colour palette also proved to be a successful strategy for the artist to break free from the baggage of the Western art history. This unique visual language created by Yan would ultimately make him one of the most revered Chinese artists in today’s art world, with frequent comparison with Western masters such as Andy Warhol, Thomas Ruff, and Willem De Kooning.

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. “Man is like a mirror and that is exactly what interests me. When we look at a painting, it is like looking through a mirror. The image is a kind of mirror. […] I am interested in both metaphysics and everyday life. That’s it. I can’t isolate myself from all reality; in fact the titles of my portraits often have a strong connection to it. The function of the mirror is to reflect the times.”2 Widely known as a pessimist, Yan’s work often deals with the universal and inevitable aspect of death as dominantly marked by the blend of black and white. Thus,it is interesting to find traces of red and white in the present work Self-Portrait, curiously highlighting a different side within the artist’s state of mind. As Yan Pei-Ming previously stated, “The world is a dark place. So I use black as a form of expression. Red is the colour of hope.”3

Furthermore, considering that within Chinese tradition, red also represents purity and virtue, Self- Portrait is a rare work that showcases a sentimental side of the artist. Unlike most of his other self- portraits that depict a full frontal perspective of the artist with his eyes gazing directly towards the viewer, the present work, by illustrating only three quarter of his face, eyes staring to his right side, offers a critical insight into a subtle aesthetic move that further demonstrate the genuine attempt by the artist in breaking his own boundary. The exemplary brushwork in the present work also showcases the artist’s highly renowned ability in conquering large canvas surface, at once evoking the psychological revelation intrinsic to the works by Lucian Freud, most notably in the work Reflection (Self Portrait) from 1985. The thick impasto paint by the British artist, forming the contours and shades of his own facade, are transformed into a sea of red in Yan’s present work. Disregarding the use of studio assistants, Yan is known to execute his works quietly in his Dijon studio, using extra- large paint brushes in creating a series of rapid brushstrokes, reminiscent also of the visual drive of Action Painting in America during the 1960s. Yan himself has also commented on the significance of his technique, “Everyone imagines I work very quickly because, in my work, you can’t see the sweat. […] I like that in my work you can see spontaneity. Even though I work a lot, I don’t want people to see a sense of labor in my paintings. I just want them to sense that spontaneity and impact.”4

While people have mainly focused the rise of contemporary Chinese art within mainland China with artists from the “Cynical Realism” and “Political Pop” movement, the global renown of Yan Pei-Ming has proved that it is possible to create a distinctive trail away from mainstream trends. His passion towards recreating a unique visual language, as seen in Self Portrait, has indeed overcome every single barrier in the contemporary art world. To this feat, the artist humbly replies, “My aim is set at the highest, that is, to be acknowledged by the whole world, and to be an influential artist in the world. Now I feel I am still out of the playground, and my game has not started. I am doing the warm-up exercise.”

1 Fabian Stech, “Interview with Yan Pei-Ming- Chinese Kung Fu”, Yan Pei-ming, 2005

2 Refer to 1

3 Hou Hanru, “In a Dream”, Art Asia Pacific, 2007

4 “Yan Pei-ming with Charles Schultz”, The Brooklyn Rail, 2012

5 Wang Huangsheng, “Forward”, Yan Pei-ming: Life Souvenir, 2005

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