DSL Magazine: Issue 6

Yan Pei-Ming grew up during the Cultural Revolution and used to draw Mao and red guards propaganda pictures as a kid. At the age of 18, he was rejected by the Shanghai Art and Design Academy. This gave him the opportunity to open a new path in his life: in 1980, he moved to France, learned French and graduated at Dijon School of Fine Arts. Later he spent a one-year residency in Rome at the Villa Médicis. For him, it was a fantastic experience as he discovered the whole tradition of Western painting. He felt he was taking part in a long History, exploring a universal pictorial language that goes beyond times and cultures. In 2009, Yan had the chance to exhibit at the Louvre where he presented The Funeral of Mona Lisa . Painting from Mona Lisa was obvious to him as it is the most famous painting in the world. He wanted to pay homage to her mythic figure and wished at the same time to bring her further on. This is how he revisited her and buried her at the same time. Miao Xiaochun (b.1964) also sees himself as part of a continuous history of universal art, in which each artist responds to his predecessors. The point becomes now to inscribe oneself into this global history, insisting on continuity, hybridation, interlinking of times and spaces. However, while praising thus inheritance and filiation, Miao also insists on his will to create a unique and original language. The artist has produced work inspired by Cranach the older, Bosch, Michelangelo all in all more than 70 paintings inspired him. Trained in oil painting but also in the use of Chinese ink, Miao painted for ten years before turning to photography as an autodidact. He then moved over to the new media and created a single visual language integrating informatics and photography. He will say, “Bacon had only his brushes while we have the computers”. His numerical approach of the classics of painting allows him to renew their perception: hundred years after cubism, he wishes to prolong this reflection work on the multiplication of points of view, by inventing a new grammar, capable of expressing our new relationship to the world. He combines his formal research with a ceaseless interrogation about the future of man, whom he often represents as close to the animal or to the machine. His parallel quest for identity took the form of an alter ego which the artist created very early: as he was a student in Germany, he invented another “I”, whom he represented in his series Visitor of the past (1999-2004) under the shape of a scholar-visitor from the Song dynasty. He would carry with him all the time this very light sculpture in polyester. Later, he brought it back to China and staged it there as a symbol of the existing gap between him and his contemporaries: in his own country he felt a stranger.