Yan Pei Ming

Paris based Chinese artist Yan Pei Ming is a figurative painter whose work explores the boundaries of resemblance. Creating images that are removed from their original sources whilst at the same time remaining recognisable, his paintings inhabit a halfway house between study and invention making the issue of interpretation and identification provocatively ambiguous. International Landscape belongs to his renowned series that depict unidentified places reduced them to their basic details. The locations they reveal could be anywhere and nowhere, hence the title here of ‘non lieu’. Pei Ming explained the motivation behind the series: “It’s always very simple: a tree, a little house, sometimes a lake. Like a perfect chromolithograph. When you ask people to describe a landscape they, they describe a lake, a house, some trees, it’s as simple as that.” (Yan Pei Ming cited in Michael Nurisdany, China, Art Now, Paris 2004, p. 46) Described by the bold impasto of his brutal painting technique, the scene is at once fabulously expressive and resolutely passive. Its distilled colour range is in a state of permanent conflict against the impasto drips of the paint and the overt classicism of his subject matter.