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Nantes
lle de Nantes (eastern point),
Hôtel de Région

“108 Brigands”
Yan Pei-Ming


“108 Brigands” is for now, Yan-Pei Ming’s big Work. Executed during his stay at the French Academy in Rome (Villa Médicis) in 1993, this set of 120 portraits refers to a classic of Chinese literature, “Au bord de l’eau” (at the water’s edge) epic novel, which tells in 120 chapters the crimes of 108 brigands. Ming has often talked about anti-portraits when referring to his paintings of faces because he devotes himself to portraying the extras of History, the “no-name”, those whose faces are meant to sink into oblivion, that is to say almost all of us.

Propaganda painter under Mao’s system before he emigrated to France, Yan-Pei Ming has managed for more than twenty years now to remain in the unlikely position of an artist who, as well as being fully assimilated by the art western stage, kept resisting to fit in the only categories of such stage. In his paintings, Ming adjusts inside the European genre of portrait, paintings to the dimensions of propaganda painting: the face taking up the whole space on a very big size canvas, is treated as a landscape.

www.yanpeiming.com

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