Exhibition on view: 20 February–23 May 2009
The Walter and McBean Galleries
800 Chestnut Street campus
Tuesdays–Saturdays, 11:00am–6:00pm
Yan, Obama, 2008, oil on canvas, 98.5 x 79 in. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner in New York. © Yan Pei-Ming, ADAGP, Paris, 2008. Photo credit: André Morin.
Having grown up in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s, felt the first flickers of the post–Mao Zedong reforms, and then moved to France in 1980. Yan Pei-Ming is an apt representative of a generation of global citizens who have at once weathered the alienating mutations of late-twentieth-century geopolitics and relevantly contributed to the ongoing globalization process ensuing upon them. Indeed, the fact that he has existed and worked at the crossroads of global struggle, both physical and spiritual, is what centrally informs Yan’s creative activities.
As if in constant agitation, radiating large, fast strokes that “conquer” the moving ground, Yan’s paintings are not so much frozen structures of color and form as literal testaments to the agency inherent in the process by which they are made—a process that is, notwithstanding, persistently haunted by ideologically suffused memories. Primarily using black (sometimes, red) and white to construct an artificial world beyond the “reality” of the full color spectrum, Yan’s economical portraits of iconic or historic figures (for example, Mao himself, Pope John Paul II, Bruce Lee, and Barack Obama) are, in the most straightforward sense of the word, actions. And, like most actions, these too admit of multiple interpretations.
Yan Pei-Ming was born in 1960 in Shanghai, China. He moved to France in 1980 where he quickly became a star on the French painting scene. Now known internationally for his larger-than-life, much-sought portraits of political and cultural icons, he has emerged as one of the most dynamic and experimental Chinese/French painters. His expressive style and controlled palette reflect aesthetic influences from both the Chinese cultural tradition and twentieth-century Western conceptual art. He has had solo exhibitions at such venues as David Zwirner in New York, the Musée d’Art Moderne in Saint-Etienne (France), the Shanghai Art Museum, the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou (China), Kunsthalle Mannheim (Germany), and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon (France). Group exhibitions include the 10th International Istanbul Biennial (curated by Hou Hanru), the 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Seville (Spain) (artistic director, Okwui Enwezor, SFAI’s dean of Academic Affairs), the Grand Palais in Paris, the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, and the 1995 and 2003 Venice Biennials.
