Florence, French-Chinese artist Yan Pei-Ming's exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi.

From July 7 to September 3, 2023, Palazzo Strozzi in Florence presents Yan Pei-Ming, Painter of Stories, the largest exhibition ever dedicated in Italy to the French-Chinese artist Yan Pei-Ming (Shanghai, 1960), part of the Palazzo Strozzi Future Art project developed with the Hillary Merkus Recordati Foundation. Curated by Arturo Galansino, director general of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, the exhibition offers a pathway of more than 30 works that allow the visitor to explore the artist’s powerful and original research on the relationship between image and reality, in a short-circuit between personal life and collective history, symbols and icons of culture and art history between East and West.

Exploring genres such as portraiture, landscape, still life and history painting, his paintings come to life from the model of photographic images extrapolated from different sources, such as personal images, newspaper covers, film stills or famous works of art history.

Renowned for his reflection on painting in today’s art, Yan Pei-Ming invites us to rethink the relationship between history and contemporaneity, memory and the present. Exploring genres such as portraiture, landscape, still life, and history painting, his paintings come to life from the model of photographic images extrapolated from diverse sources, such as personal images, newspaper covers, film stills, or famous works of art history. Yan Pei-Ming leads us to reflect on the contradiction between reality and representation, truth and image construction, an increasingly central theme in the age of digital reproduction and sharing of public history and our private lives.

Thus it is that the exhibition alternates monumental self-portraits and portraits of his mother and father or of historical figures such asMao Zedong and Adolf Hitler along with original reinterpretations of works such as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa or Velázquez’s Innocent X or two Time magazine covers dedicated respectively in 2008 to Russian President Vladimir Putin and in 2022 to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In a direct connection to Italy, the exhibition also hosts a sequence of paintings linked to famous photographic images that documented dramatic moments in twentieth-century Italian history, in a sort of secular deposition trilogy: the upside-down display of the bodies of Benito Mussolini and Claretta Petacci at Piazzale Loreto in Milan in 1945; the upside-down body of Pier Paolo Pasolini at the Ostia seaplane in 1975; and the discovery of Aldo Moro in the trunk of a car in Rome in 1978. Born in Shanghai in 1960, Yan Pei-Ming moved to France in 1980, where he now lives and works. As he puts it, “I presume to be a Chinese and European artist, but I am first and foremost an artist.” Growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution, he was in fact trained on European art history by fusing together techniques, sources and themes that hybridize East and West. Fundamental to the artist are iconographic models of Western visual culture, but these are also joined by subjects that refer directly to China, such as the figures of the tiger and the dragon or those of Mao and Bruce Lee, a myth of his childhood and an iconic link between West and East, Hollywood and Hong Kong.

Yan Pei-Ming is a painter of history and stories: a “painter of history” when he rereads iconic moments of the past, even the recent past, but also a personal “painter of stories.” As he himself states, “I am not a romantic painter, I am a painter of our time.” Portraying himself and his family members or famous historical figures or moments, Yan Pei-Ming enhances a direct and almost brutal relationship with his models through a style based on vigorous and broad brushstrokes laid directly without preparatory drawings. He calls himself an “assault painter”-Yan Pei-Ming attacks the canvas with great energy, almost in hand-to-hand combat with the paint material. The palette is often two-tone: black and white, red and white, blue and white. Color becomes a way to amplify the expressive force of his paintings, often created in monumental formats, into which the viewer seems to be able to “enter.” The images become almost abstract at close range, blobs of color intertwining and overlapping, acquiring sharpness only from a distance. The same sharpness that can be perceived for events of the near past, which need chronological detachment to be understood and analyzed.

Yan Pei-Ming’s painting is powerful and direct, as he says: “it is not a caress,” says Arturo Galansino, Director General of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and curator of the exhibition. “With this exhibition Palazzo Strozzi continues its mission to create a dialogue between past and present, involving artists who know how to interpret our time. Yan Pei-Ming reflects on the human condition, blending together diverse sources between reality and imagination, private life and public history. He is a painter of stories and not only of History because in his painting one can find images that have marked the recent past along with masterpieces of art history and the intimate account of his own personal story. The artist explores the potential of painting and the ability of this medium to be current, accessible and engaging for everyone.”

The exhibition is promoted and organized by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence as part of the Palazzo Strozzi Future Art project developed with the Hillary Merkus Recordati Foundation. Main supporter: Fondazione CR Firenze. Supporters: City of Florence, Tuscany Region, Florence Chamber of Commerce, Intesa Sanpaolo, Palazzo Strozzi Partners Committee. With the contribution of Città Metropolitana di Firenze.

For all information, you can visit the official website of Palazzo Strozzi.

Pictured: Yan Pei-Ming, Chien hurlant (2022). Ph. credit: Clérin-Morin

Florence, French-Chinese artist Yan Pei-Ming's exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi.

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