PROVENANCE:

Galerie Anne De Villepoix, Paris

EXHIBITED:

The Way of the Dragon, Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris, 2004

ILLUSTRATED:

Yan Pei-Ming, Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House, Shanghai, 2005, color illustrated

The 2010 Shanghai Expo treats its visitors to seven major artworks from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, including a sculpture by Auguste Rodin and six paintings by renowned artists Jean-François Millet, Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, and Pierre Bonnard-a veritable cross section of 19th century French visual art. Yet in the space outside the France Pavilion is exhibited a series of portraits of young children titled "Children of Shanghai", which are the work of Yan Pei Ming, a Chinese painter from a working-class background, who has been living in France for 30 years now. As a matter of fact, the France Pavilion also shows the work of two other Chinese artists, Zao Wou-ki, one of the deans of modern Chinese painting, and the late installation artist Chen Zhen. One thing all three share is that their work is featured in the permanent collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Yan Pei Ming has the further distinction of having had a solo exhibition at the Louvre.

Born to a worker's family in Shanghai in 1960, Yan early showed a penchant for painting. Growing up during the Cultural Revolution, he painted many pictures of workers, farmers, soldiers, as well as Communist heroes and party leaders. In addition, he produced propaganda placards and posters. At a time when most contemporary Chinese artists did not dare to tackle the subject, Yan already did portraits of Mao Zedong. He first began to do black-and-white paintings after moving to Dijon in 1982, and in 1987 embarked on a whole series of Mao Zedong portraits, cleverly promoting himself and his work via the iconic face of China's former leader. When first putting these Mao portraits on public display, he titled the exhibition "Through His History My Stories Just Started." Yan soon garnered international recognition, and was even awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome. Today, he is a well-known name in European art circles, and one of China's most important cultural ambassadors in France.

Most of Yan Pei Ming's paintings are portraits, but they always manage to put their finger on urgent social or moral issues, and directly or indirectly deal with serious topics such as war, injustice, life and death. Yan by no means limits himself to portraits of famous personalities: many of his pictures show children, or are captivating depictions of the underprivileged, members of the anonymous masses. Most of his portraits are very big, or "epic-sized," overwhelming the observer with their sheer momentum, and allowing even the anonymous nobody to appear a larger-than-life giant. His experiences as a youth during the Cultural Revolution, when the streets in China's cities were plastered with propaganda posters or dazibaos, and he himself also made a large number of such political placards, clearly exerted a crucial influence on the development of his style. In fact, all of Yan's work is suffused with an ideological undercurrent, a deep urge to convey truth and voice criticism. Just like propaganda posters, his paintings are so large that they force the observer to raise his head, as if looking at a religious statute in a church, or an idol demanding sacrifice. In the process, one cannot help but feel small and insignificant. Yet Yan's portraits are not simple celebrations of their subjects-far from worshipping the depicted figures, he assails and deconstructs them. Under his subversive brushstrokes, political and cultural icons may lose their superficial luster and suddenly appear tired or weak.

The series of paintings on display at the Shanghai Expo, "Children of Shanghai", shows mostly children of neighbors and friends, the next generation of people of ordinary background. Some of them are laughing, some crying, others are knitting their brow or have a distinctly impish look on their face: a comprehensive kaleidoscope of children's miens. Yan says that he is very fond of children, and that they are humanity's future, our only hope for tomorrow. The main slant of his portraits of children, however, is of a rather serious nature, as the artist himself points out. Many of them show children from Third World countries suffering the effects of war, famine and poverty. In addition to calling the viewer's attention to these problems, this is-artistically speaking-also a reversal of the traditional function of portraits, which often served to glorify famous and important people.

This lot, "The Little Shanghai Girl", was completed in 2004, the year that the artist's father passed away. The girl's eyes are wide open as she stares at us with a flustered and somewhat helpless expression on her face. Maybe here we catch a glimpse of Yan's own confusion at the time, since his feelings towards his father had always been very complicated and complex. As long as his father had still been alive, Yan was his child. But now that he was gone, Yan suddenly was completely thrown back on himself, his own mortality put into sharp focus. In the following period, he tried to digest the new situation by repeatedly dealing with the question of the "three generations" in his work-the idea of father, self, and children. When returning to China in 2005 for a grand solo exhibition of his work, he dedicated the traveling exhibition to his father, and made a point of making Shanghai an important stop.

Yan Pei Ming often calls himself a "Shanghai orphan," and says that he sees the world through the eyes of a "cultural orphan," someone who had to work his way up from the very bottom with no one but himself to rely on. When he burst onto the international art scene, it was neither as a representative of China, nor as a representative of French art. No, he did it by himself and for himself. But Yan comes from humble beginnings, and he does care a lot about China and the future of her people. If one looks very carefully, there is a subtle hint of self-portraiture in his portraits of both famous and anonymous people: a faint reflection of his ultimate concerns about social issues.