Yan Pei-Ming

Yan Pei-Ming’s portraits breach the boundaries of traditional painting while employing the conventional rhetoric intrinsic to the genre. Taking his subjects both from the public and private sphere, he transfers them onto canvas in a direct, spontaneous and dramatic style. His pantheon of subjects includes the Pope, Bruce Lee and Mao – international figureheads or religion, media and politics who enthuse the masses and control them – but also a select group of personal deities, first among them the artist’s father, now deceased, the sitter of the present work. It is in these personal portraits, rather than in the totemic images of Mao, that the full expressive potency of Yan Pei-Ming’s work is best communicated.

The present work, a portrait of the artist’s father painted in 1996, reveals in its expressive rawness the tangible familiarity between artist and sitter, the boldly articulated brushstrokes enlivened by a palpable sense of emotional communion between the two. An employee of the local abattoir in the Chinese immigrant neighbourhood of Shanghai, Ming’s father, as the subtitle of the present work suggests, was an artistic as well as familial guardian who supported Ming’s creative path. Much like Frank Auerbach, Ming here succeeds in capturing concisely not just the recognisable physiology of the sitter but something of his thought, preoccupations and nervous disposition. Like the London School artist, Ming in his portraits penetrates the surface to expose his sitter’s essential psychological makeup. As the artist says “For me the portrait is about the soul, about humanity” (the artist cited in Exhibition Catalogue, Mannheim, Kunsthalle, Yan Pei-Ming: The Way of the Dragon, 2005, p. 101). The eyes are key to this exposition of the soul: “through the eyes you can see the person behind” (Ibid, p. 102)

Working in a similarly organic, instinctual process, Ming does not paint something but gives rise to it. Trowelled thickly in assured, confident brushstrokes, the familiar features of the sitter emerge from the deep, saturated red hue which Ming reserves for his most important compositions. Unlike Auerbach, Ming does not paint from the model but from photographs and stored images which are memorised before painting. This liberates his hand from pure representation and allows more impulsive expression. Working frenetically and spontaneously, his fervid, energetic technique recalls that of the Abstract Expressionist action and gestural painters. In its larger than life format, the present work takes on an immense and intense painterly presence. In Ming’s hands the traditional genre of portraiture, conventionally a representational mode of painting, opens itself up to explicitly formal concerns. Living in France for the last twenty years at a time when painting has experienced a demise, Ming has staunchly resisted conceptual art and new media, reinvigorating and rejuvenating the traditional genre of portraiture.