Yan Pei-Ming

Yan Pei-Ming arrived in France in the early 1980s and settled in Dijon where he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He quickly took up portraiture, a genre considered minor in China, and was noticed for his first series of Mao's Heads at the end of the 1980s. Winner of the Prix de Rome in 1993, Yan Pei-Ming has since produced numerous portraits based on models or documents, of anonymous people or icons (Michael Jackson, John Paul II, Bruce Lee, etc.). The illustration of status and power in traditional portraiture is particularly important for his work, which revives the archetypes of age-old conventions of representation. At the same time, since the mid-1990s, he has reactivated the tradition of history painting. Following in the footsteps of painters such as Goya, David, Delacroix and Géricault, Yan Pei-Ming transforms the media images of the boat people, the Iraq war and September 11 into timeless scenes that reveal the tragic fate of humanity. From the strong to the weak, from compassion to violence, his self-portraits, dead or in Christ, portraits of his dying father, but also representations of wild animals or weapons of war, draw an uncompromising picture of his time.

Le Printemps de septembre exhibits his painting Xavier Douroux, portrait of a friend.