Yan Pei-Ming valuation
Shanghai-born painter in France of huge black-and-white and red-and-white portraits, from Mao and popes to his own father.
Yan Pei-Ming was born in Shanghai in 1960, grew up during the Cultural Revolution and learned to paint in propaganda classes at school.
What a work by Yan Pei-Ming is worth
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Bio
Yan Pei-Ming was born in Shanghai in 1960, grew up during the Cultural Revolution and learned to paint in propaganda classes at school. Turned down by the Shanghai art and design school, he left China and arrived in France in 1980, enrolling at the École des Beaux-Arts in Dijon in 1981 and graduating in 1986; he has lived in Dijon since, with a studio near Paris. He is known above all for portraits on a huge scale, painted fast with very large brushes in two tones, black and white or red and white: Mao Zedong, whom he returned to from 1987, Bruce Lee, Barack Obama, popes, his own father and himself, and anonymous children. Close up the paintings dissolve into sweeping strokes; from a distance the face snaps into focus. He also paints history and current events and reworks the Old Masters, and calls himself a European painter. He was in the Venice Biennale of 2003, and in 2009 the Louvre showed The Funeral of Mona Lisa, which set Leonardo's painting beside portraits of his father and himself.
The large canvases are what museums and buyers chase, and the subject, the date and the exhibition history set a work apart; Mao portraits and self-portraits are among the most recognised. He also makes large watercolours and works on paper, and prints. Very large canvases need careful handling, and broad, dry passages of paint can abrade. A provenance through Thaddaeus Ropac, which represents him, supports a work.
Shanghai, Dijon and the Louvre
In 2019 his work was shown with Gustave Courbet's at the Musée Courbet in Ornans, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon and the Petit Palais in Paris, and at the Musée d'Orsay.
His work is in the Centre Pompidou, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and the National Gallery of Australia.
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