Yan Pei-Ming - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 17, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels

  • Exhibited

     
     

  • Catalogue Essay

    “Yan Pei Ming is certainly one of the most determined and intransigent painters of our time. Looking at Ming’s powerful work, one becomes fully aware of the tension, and the inseparable connection between art and life.”
    (Quote from Hou Hanru, taken from www.artzinechina.com)
     
    Born in Shanghai but based in France since 1980,Yan Pei Ming’s extensive body of work represents a unique on-going dialogue with Eastern and Western history, experience and artistic practice. He is part of a group of Chinese artists working abroad, elevating the idea of Chinese art that is both modern and traditional, like his contemporaries such as Xu Bing, Gu Wenda, Huang Yong Ping and Cai Guo Qiang.
     
    Yan Pei Ming is obsessed with painting portraiture, focusing mostly on self-portraits, family members, anonymous strangers or more iconic figures such as Chairman Mao and Bruce Lee. In the present lot, the silhouette of a nameless face emerges from the large canvas surface, painted with a controlled palette scheme of only black and white colours. A fundamental aspect of his artistic practice was inspired by an early visit to the Van Gogh
    museum in Amsterdam, which is reflected in his painting style composed of broad sweeping gestures, splatters and splotches on canvas. However, unlike Van Gogh’s bright and colourful portraits on canvas,Yan’s works
    are typically mono or bi-chromatic in colour, painted with large brushes, sometimes even combining them to produce wider and thicker brushstrokes.
     
    Yan’s compositions of portraiture are typically monumental in scale, resembling the Big Character posters he grew up with during the Cultural Revolution. The emotional expressions depicted in his works are vibrant
    and dynamic, capturing the intensity and essential qualities of the subject into a single moment in time. Though Yan is working in a classical Western painting genre, this technique has certain similarities with Chinese Zen
    calligraphers, one that exudes an automatic aesthetic, as if revealing Yan’s visceral and subconscious feelings towards his subjects.  
     

355

Untitled

1992
Oil on canvas.
207 x 155 cm. (81 1/2 x 61 in).
Signed and dated 'Yan Pei-Ming 5.92' on the reverse.

Estimate
£100,000 - 150,000 

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

18 Oct 2008, 7pm
London