Yan Pei-Ming - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Liliane & Michel Durand-Dessert, Paris

  • Catalogue Essay

    The Shanghai-born Yan Pei-Ming lives in France and participated in this year’s Istanbul Biennale. He is internationally renowned for his portraits of political figures, his deceased father, prostitutes, and nameless victims of war—images culled from a contemporary global iconography. In Yan’s portraits, personality cults are, turned inside out, mere receptacles of our individual, composite desires. The critic Rolf Lauter says, “The portraits and self-portraits, bodies and figures are magma-like animated images of people from which politicians or idols such as the Pope, Bruce Lee or Mao seem to emerge like a second reality. Ming shows famous persons as symbolically charged images of people who enthuse the masses and control them. These persons exude strength and radiate energy, serving thus as images or counter-images,” (R. Lauter, “Introduction,” The Way of the Dragon, Heidelberg, 2005, p. 24). In an interview with Asian Art News,Yan muses on his painting of Mao: “When, for example, I paint the portrait of Mao, I am painting a father figure, someone who is strangely close, but also distant from me. Painting my father was very different from painting Mao, who is somebody I did not know intimately like my father. However, for the past 20 years, Mao was someone who was constantly in my daily life. In that sense, painting Mao today represents a certain continuation of that earlier presence: I have no desire to negate my past. Generally speaking, all the people I paint are quite different from one another, and in most cases, I do not know them well. Within my portraits, I am illustrating theories... Regarding Mao, I often wonder: how is it possible for one man in a country the size of China to have such a significant presence, if he has no outstanding qualities matched with a great deal of cruelty? In order to prevail as a leader, Mao had to be exceptional to resolve the situations he faced. I think he is one of the key figures of the 20th century. Of course, one can argue that he was also a murderer, but one should keep in mind that a mild person rarely makes a president,” (P.Yan, Asian Art News, November, 2004).

43

Portrait de Mao

1997
Oil on canvas.
92 1/2 x 78 3/4 in. (235 x 200 cm).
Signed, titled and dated “Portrait de Mao Yang Pei-Ming 97” on the reverse.

Estimate
$400,000 - 600,000 

Sold for $601,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York