About the lot N° 338
Title : Yan Pei-Ming B. 1960 Invisible Man
Provenance : Rodolphe Jansen Gallery, BrusselsAcquired from the above by the present owner
Notes : Yan Pei Ming, or just Ming as he is known to the European world where he has made his career, is a painter of human emotion. His signature style of wide brushstrokes, monochromatic composition, and single-figure portraiture marks a Yan Pei Ming from a distance. The two works offered in this sale, from 2000 and 2003 respectively, do not manifest much significant difference in terms of technique or sensibility. While his peers on the mainland were encountering rapid change in their living environment and artistic practice, Ming was firmly ensconced in the bourgeois comforts of Dijon, where he has lived since the mid-1980s.Invisible Man, 2000 (Lot 338), alludes to the anonymous African-American protagonist of Ralph Ellison's 1953 novel. The alienation felt by the novel's narrator, as he progresses from the pastoral American south to a black college into a white-owned factory and ultimately to the racially charged streets of Harlem. The persona of the ethnically differentiated everyman may have appealed to Yan Pei Ming, who has spent most of his life living as something of an outsider in provincial France. Yan has been a lifelong stutterer, his earliest years in France were spent as a waiter in a Taiwanese restaurant. Ellison's novel has also proved fertile ground for contemporary artists, including the photographer Jeff Wall who made a photograph of a man to resemble the book's narrator sitting in his basement apartment, illuminated with 1369 light bulbs (After 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, The Prologue). It is an interesting coincidence that Yan Pei Ming's Invisible Man dates to the same year.The later work Self-Portrait as a Hooligan (Lot 339)is Yan Pei Ming at his most classically ironic. Arrayed at the center of the canvas, he gazes offhandedly back at himself, wide brushstrokes giving way to punctuating drips of black or white. The bushy eyebrows, the upturned lip, the sullen expression—all speak to an attempt to create a persona somewhat unexpected to those who know him well. Realized in 2003, this painting dates to the beginning of a series in which he would explore his own face in various hypothetical scenarios. Another key self-portrait, from 2007, depicts the artist in a noose, his neck cropped over but his face still resolutely alive. For an artist whose practice has been so much about seeing into the emotional center of figures drawn from history and pop culture, it is only natural that the self would offer the most compelling subject of all.Yan Pei Ming has begun to experiment with serializing his portraits—as in his extended meditations on figures like Mao Zedong, the Pope, and Bruce Lee—and more recently to push the boundaries of painting toward other media, as in his installation last year at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing where painted images of orphans fluttered on the same blower flagpoles used for Olympic medal ceremonies, only hung upside-down. As these experiments reveal new possibilities for his art, his most basic paintings become all the more relevant and interesting for understanding this massive figure in contemporary Chinese art history.
Sotheby's, auctioneer, Admiralty, CN
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Sale title : CONTEMPORARY ASIAN ART
Sale date : 05 Apr 2010
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Sale Reference : Live Sale
