(born China in 1960; lives and works in Dijon, France)
“Invisible Man”, in white paint titled, signed, dated Yan Pei Ming September 1997 on the reverse and with the work number HH97010 and chinese signed,
oil on canvas, 177 x 167 cm, framed, (PS)

Provenance:
Private Property, Germany

Born in Shanghai in 1960 and living in France since 1981, painter Yan Pei-Ming is a protagonist of contemporary Chinese art. The eyes of the “invisible man” are covered by two broad, white strips, preventing the viewer from seeing into the man’s soul. Yan Pei-Ming combines the abstract aesthetics of painting with conceptions of life, activity, politics and cultural history, and by appealing to society’s collective memory, wishes to be regarded as a historical painter. “Emotion touches those who remember what they have seen. That is very important. A painting without emotion is very quickly forgotten. Today it’s almost taboo for a painter to appeal to the emotions. But that’s all that counts. In June 2004 I visited an exhibition of Francis Bacon in the Fondation Beyeler near Basel. I was extremely impressed because he had painted with so much pain.” (as cited above, p. 98).
“Thus the paintings reveal more about the nature and soul of a person, rather than their looks or external appearance, even where Ming lends his portraits a characteristically indescribable aura of individuality. In doing so, Ming’s painting paraphrases a factual, living and changing manifestation of the present, rather than mirroring a frozen, photographically fixed or momentary reality.” (Rolf Lauter, as cited above p. 13f). “Almost all of Ming’s motifs transcend the framework of traditional painting, with their often monumental format, the impasto and usually palette-knifed application of paint which appears to explode the surface of the canvas in all dimensions, or though his reduction of the colouring to complex grey or red tones, achieving an unusual level of plasticity.” (Rolf Lauter, as cited above, p.13f). “Ming chooses oversized formats in order to immerse himself in the artistic process of painting the portrait, applying the paint in an impulsive manner, quickly and intuitively, with no preliminary sketches. He works obsessively and almost without interruption until he has reached his goal. The discarnate portrait appears and disappears before the viewer’s eyes depending upon their distance from the portrait. Thus Ming invites the viewer to engage with the portrait as a landscape.” (as cited above, p.98f). He also uses the potential offered by Chinese calligraphy, using the broad brush as an extension of his arm, revealing his personality through the reverberations of his painterly flow.
(Exhibition catalogue. Kunsthalle Mannheim, Yan Pei-Ming, The Way of the Dragon, Mannheim 2005)