Da Vinci reloaded

Hannah Wesley

• Last Updated: November 04. 2009 1:44PM UAE / November 4. 2009 9:44AM GMT

"The Mona Lisa represents the tradition of a great western culture," says the Chinese artist Yan Pei-Ming of the inspiration for his work Les funerailles de Mona Lisa. Patrick Kovarik / AFP

The Year of the Ox, 2009, may as well have been the Year of Yan Pei-Ming. Often referred to as the most French of Chinese artists, this year he not only exhibited work in one of France’s most hallowed institutions, the Musée du Louvre, he also had solo shows in San Francisco and Beijing, and later this month he will make his debut in the Middle East when his work The Funeral of goes on show as part of Art Abu Dhabi at Emirates Palace.

Pei-Ming’s works are widely collected in Europe, appearing in auctions by Christie’s and Sotheby’s where they have sold for as much as $500,000 (Dh1.85m), while in his native country he is considered to be one of the most expressive Chinese-born oil painters in the world.

For an artist who embraces multiculturalism, the exhibition of his work in Abu Dhabi has a special resonance. “The show is an amazing example of globalisation – and the globalisation of the art market – that I, an artist of Chinese origin, should be representing a French institution in the Middle East,” he says.

Indeed this Franco-Chinese painter has come a long way from a childhood spent in the shadow of Mao.

“I’m delighted to be exhibiting in Abu Dhabi. It’s the first time my work will have gone on show in the Emirates,” he says. “But I’m particularly pleased because I’ll be representing the Louvre, which in itself is an enormous honour. Our show prefigures the presence of the new Louvre. It’s serious stuff.”

The Louvre is the most popular art museum in the world, with 8.5 million visitors a year, and Pei-Ming’s large-scale work made him a logical candidate for an initiative which aims to confront the work of contemporary artists with that of the old masters. Not one to shy away from challenges, Pei-Ming chose to take on the painting that in many ways has come to represent the western tradition of figurative painting and is, perhaps, the most famous portrait of all time – Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa; a painting that also happens to have been one of the few western works of art to be reproduced in China under Maoism. Although the Mona Lisa has previously been the subject of parody by other artists, notably Duchamp, who added a moustache and a goatee, and Andy Warhol, who created serigraph prints of her, never before has a copy been put on show in such proximity with the original. Mona Lisa’s Funeral was installed in the room next to the original enigmatic portrait.

The work comprises five canvases which, says Pei-Ming, took him a year to plan but only 12 days to paint. At the centre is the Mona Lisa herself on a canvas that measures 2.8 metres square. Painted in shades of grey, she still wears her inscrutable smile but this time has tears running down her face. To either side of her are large landscapes (2.8m x 5m) strewn with skulls – skulls that are copies of Pei-Ming’s own scanned skull. Two further grey canvases show a portrait of the artist’s dying father and a self-portrait of Pei-Ming in the morgue. Painted in vigorous, confident monochrome brushstrokes, the work creates an atmospheric ensemble and leaves the spectator searching for a meaning within its multilayered possibilities. Is it, as some critics have suggested, a meditation on the passing of the generations? A reflection on the permanence of art versus the ephemeral nature of life? Or a commentary by an eastern artist on the western fine-art canon?

“When I was invited to exhibit at the Louvre I was very touched,” explains Pei-Ming. “The Funeral of Mona Lisa is a work that is very important to me. The Mona Lisa is perhaps the best-known image in the world so my painting is at once a very personal piece of work but also very public – very much like a funeral. I portrayed the end of the Mona Lisa, one day another artist will come along and resuscitate her.

“The Mona Lisa represents the tradition of a great western culture. I’d never copied her before, although she was much copied in China. I wanted to bring to that my personal story – a personal story that is also every man’s story: the relationship between father and son. I wanted to represent absolute suffering, the father who contemplates his dead son. For youth to be in mourning for the old is natural but when someone with white hair is mourning someone with black hair – that’s a tragedy. White is the colour of mourning in China and my grey paint, almost silver, is the closest pictorial representation I could get to that.”

Pei-Ming’s father, who worked in an abattoir in Shanghai, died in France in 2003 but lived long enough to be proud of his son’s achievements. “Of course the death of my own father is one of the associations I bring to this work,” he says. “But I also wanted to pay homage to the Louvre and to the tradition of western culture that the Mona Lisa represents.”

The son of factory workers, born in 1960, shortly before the Cultural Revolution, Pei-Ming describes his childhood as peaceful. The family lived in a disaffected Buddhist monastery, which became the local police station in 1967. His talent for drawing was spotted at an early age and he was encouraged both at home and at school. “When I was 11,” he says, “my mother took me to buy calligraphy brushes which cost her the equivalent of a year’s salary.”

Trained, like his contemporaries, in the art of social realism, Pei-Ming’s earliest paintings were copies of propaganda posters, so it is, perhaps, no coincidence that the works for which he was first acclaimed in France were portraits of Chairman Mao Zedong. During the Cultural Revolution, Pei-Ming remembers how he painted workers and peasants, Mao and revolutionaries; images that fitted in with the current political ideals. Failing his entrance interview for Shanghai Art and Design School because of his stutter, Pei-Ming left China for France in 1980, gaining a student visa with the help of a family member who had settled in France. Life wasn’t easy at first. He struggled to learn French, studying painting by day at the art school in Dijon and working in a Taiwanese restaurant by night. This was followed by a year at the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques in Paris. Today he continues to live in Dijon where, he says, the vineyards remind him of rice paddies. Although three of his four siblings and his mother today live in France, he still returns regularly to China.

Throughout his career, Pei-Ming’s style has continued to contain echoes of totalitarian aesthetics. The large format of his portraits and the sometimes hierarchic attitude of his subjects, often political figures, use the legacy of social realism without ever falling into its trap. His simplified palette of black and white and grey with the occasional addition of a dramatic red is resolutely modern while his very gestural technique brings him into a lineage of painterly portraitists. He situates himself within a western canon and admires painters such as Velasquez, Raphael, Bacon, da Vinci, Titian, de Kooning and Warhol.

“That’s what I am,” he says, “a painter. All of my energy is given over to painting.”

Concentrating, above all, on expression and drawing, colour is of little importance to Pei-Ming. He says the absence of colour takes his painting closer to the art of writing. For him, there is less artifice and less to distract the spectator from the essential subject. He explains that the absence of colour also lends more importance to the movement of light within the work.

Today the majority of his output is still portraiture but Pei-Ming paints as many anonymous faces as he does well-known ones. His work is as likely to depict the forgotten faces of society – the beggars, abandoned children, prisoners. His paintings are executed after photographs, models or from memory. Always larger than life, his work often achieves a monumental scale.

Earlier this year, his portrait of Bernie Madoff, author of the Ponzi scheme that has been described as the largest investment fraud in Wall Street history, caused a stir at New York’s Armory Show. “Nobody will buy the painting,” Pei-Ming observes, “People don’t like it. But the man was not just pure evil. He made money for some people, and we don’t hear from them now, of course. He probably didn’t start out as a rogue. I think what happened to him is symbolic of the state of today’s world of finance.”

In contrast, his recent exhibition at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing was entitled Landscape of Childhood and included 34 portraits of orphaned and abandoned children. In a manner reminiscent of a totalitarian parade ground, the portraits were painted on to flags which hung in two alleys along the gallery space. At the time, Pei-Ming explained. “I don’t want to damage the beauty (of the space) by hanging paintings on the walls or dividing the space into areas. So I drew the landscape on one entire wall, painted the portraits on 34 flags, and hung them upside down in two rows in the middle of the hall, one metre from the ground. Visually, the flags are like at half-mast to mourn for the life and death. It’s the simplest form which keeps the transparency and beauty of the space to the greatest extent.”

Since the early years of the current decade, Pei-Ming’s work has taken on a decidedly political focus with portraits of Barack Obama and John McCain, Pope John Paul II or Buddha. His exhibition YES! at the San Francisco Art Institute showed a series of portraits, including those of Obama and McCain, but, as the Institute pointed out, the way in which the exhibition was hung undermined the classic notion of portraiture as being a celebration of one particular person: “Much of Yan’s recent work overtly concerns socio and geopolitical conflict and the related humanistic questions it engenders. Children from economically underdeveloped nations who suffer from brutality, starvation, poverty, and other disasters are poignantly portrayed side by side with UN secretaries-general and soldiers who have fought in the war in Iraq.”

But Pei-Ming says his work is less about politics than the wider human tragedy. “My work isn’t so much political as social and humanitarian,” he explains. “My portraits of abandoned children show that this is what man is capable of; what we’re all capable of. China has developed at an unbelievable speed. What we’re seeing there is the rapid rise of capitalism and there’s a colossal price to pay for so much change coming so quickly. Whenever I go back there I have the impression I’m a tourist.”

About 10 years ago, Pei-Ming started painting his own face and these self-portraits are also often reflections on the theme of death.

“Death is always with me,” he observes. “I’m afraid of dying, or rather I’m afraid of no longer being alive. Life is so brief. You wake up one morning and you’re nearly 50 years old. It is a real tragicomedy. I work every day, even the weekends. I’m in the studio all the time. I think it’s a question of not leaving any room for regret. I paint because I want to accomplish something with my life and this is what I’m good at.”

Pei-Ming lives and works in Dijon with a pied-à-terre in Paris, where he has a second studio in Ivry Sur Seine. “People come to the studio to see my work – my wife, my mother, friends and collaborators but I’m above all a solitary person,” he says. “I’m now working on a new exhibition which will go on show in London next year. I’m working on portraits of the Emperor of China and the British Queen. It’s a reflection on the nature of destiny and how our destinies are formed – what we’re capable of and to what extent we’re capable of change.”

Although he travels widely, he says he will always come home to France, a country towards which he feels grateful.

“A general needs a battle in order to shine; an artist needs art in order to express himself,” he says. “Obviously I couldn’t have done what I’ve done if I’d stayed in China. France is remarkable in welcoming and allowing foreign artists to express themselves and to succeed. Think of Picasso, Giacometti, Dalí. I studied in France for free and I’d like to give something back.”

Art Abu Dhabi will present The Funeral of Mona Lisa outside Emirates Palace, November 19-22.