Yan Pei-Ming

Biography of Yan Pei-Ming ( 1960-- )

Yan Pei-Ming is a Franco-Chinese painter based in Dijon, France. He grew up during the Cultural Revolution in China and started to paint in his spare time. He applied for admission to the Shanghai Art & Design School, but was rejected due to his stutter. In 1980, he left Shanghai for France, where he enrolled in the Fine Arts school of Dijon. Resident of the Villa Medicis in Roma, he graduated in 1999.

He is best known for his immense, and almost exclusively monochrome, portraits that draw upon Chinese cultural history and Western portraiture tradition. Some of his most acclaimed portraits depict the figures of Mao Zedong, Bruce Lee and Barack Obama. Alongside and against these public figures, Pei-Mings’ portraits extend to those of his father as well as himself.

His paintings are executed with energy and imagination, consisting of expressive brushstrokes and a predominantly monochrome palette with an occasional appearance of dark red.

In 2003, he gained international recognition at the Venice Biennale. Six years later, his work was acquisitioned by the Louvre where he exhibited a collection of portraits that sought to convey his personal perspective on Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.