ZHONG CHENG

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    YAN PEIMING (b.1960)

    Victime Juliette C

    2001

    Oil on Canvas
    200×180cm

    Signed on the Reverse: YAN Pei-Min in English

    Estimate TWD 10,000,000-15,000,000
    USD 339,000-508,500
    HKD 0-0

    Hammer Price TWD 11,564,000
    USD 386,110
    HKD 0

Provenance：

Illustrated：Les Presses Du Reel, Yan Pei-Ming: The Way of the Dragon, France, 2004, Page168

Exhibition：

Exposition：

In many ways, Yan Pei-Ming’s monolithic and expressionist portraits maintain certain continuity with his experiences and training as a young in China. His earliest training as an artist came during China’s Cultural Revolution. At the same time, the country’s landscape was over-run with “big character” posters, a mode of public political editorializing by competing political factions. Yan was impressed by the scale and directness of the posters, the bold expressiveness of the calligraphy demanding the viewer’s attention and aspired to become a professional paint image of movie stars. Later in life, Yan was most impressed by the Abstract Expressionists, not wanting to mimic them in his own arts he eliminated color from his palette and relied instead on the monochromatic, calligraphic technique of his youth.

In a body of work spanning nearly 30 years, Yan display a tireless investigation into the mysterious power of icons, by the cultural, religious and political. His preferred subjects include such figures as Bruce Lee, Mao Zedong, and Pope John Paul. But he has also given equal attention to anonymous disaster victims, self-portraits, and portraits of his father carried out in the last year of his life, and even these figures serve as icons embodying near universal aspects of the human condition. 

Many of Yan’s subjects are drawn from memory, sometimes abetted by newspaper photos or other mementos. Within his chosen vocabulary, the creation of these images serves as a process of externalization, one that allows Yan an extended meditation of the persons in his life, the meaning of their existence, and the ephemeral subjective quality of the artist’s relationship to his subject. Taken as a whole, it becomes apparent that Yan is compelled by an on-going search for identity that is at once cultural, personal, and existential.

In his portraits monumental “Victime Juliette C”, Yan reveals his fundamental worldview in his treatment of anonymous beggars or the naming of otherwise anonymous victims of disasters or crimes. In his Victime Juliette C., the figure emerges from blunt, muscular strokes against neutral and rapidly executed backgrounds. The surface of the canvas is covered with scattered splatters, attesting to the velocity of the artist’s method. The artist uses usually broad brushes that allow him not only to paint economically but with considerable urgency. Though Yan is working in a classically “Western” painting genre, this technique has certain corollaries with Chinese Zen calligraphers, who would sometimes use overly large brushes in order to sidestep their “conscious” impulses and give rise instead to a less mediated form of expression, This immediacy is apparent in Yan’s works as well, they have an almost “automatic” quality, as if revealing Yan’s visceral and subconscious feelings towards his subjects during the moment of their creation. His portraits, especially his anonymous portraits, as such are often a distillation of experience and memory, at once personal and collective, maintaining the particularity of experience and elevating his subjects beyond that of mere statistics. 

Yan has said that he only paints “miserable people”, including himself, a disposition that seems to imply a fixation on the inevitability of death. Yan’s worldview is revealed is one of profound unease, full of conflict and unrest. His singular poetic and existential vision, his obsessive return to the visages that have haunted his life, point to a life-long struggle for a moral existence against otherwise seemingly arbitrary experiences and events, a struggle that remains at the core of Yan’s generation’s experience of the 20th and 21th Century.

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