Yan Pei-Ming’s Art, And The Artist, Await Visitors In Paris

If you could visit Paris’ Musée d’Orsay or Petit Palais with a chance to meet one of the artists whose masterpieces hang there, would you go? If you could discuss Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series on a bench in front of them at the Orsay, would you? What about taking a selfie with Cezanne in front of his Bathers at the Petit Palais?

If you are a traveler who chases experiences, a once-in-a-lifetime experience potentially awaits you as Yan Pei-Ming’s art–and the artist himself–greets visitors now at the Orsay and Petit Palais.

You can’t typically meet the artists whose work has made these walls famous, of course, because they’re all dead. Long dead.

Ming, whose paintings now hang alongside them, is very much alive. In his prime, in fact.

Most guests admiring his paintings don’t realize that, figuring he’s an artist of a bygone era like all the others.

“Everyone thinks I’m dead,” Ming said through an interpreter during an interview. “(Having the work of a living artist displayed) makes it into a living museum again.”

How often can he be found at the Orsay or Petit Palais? Often enough for each security guard to smile when they see him coming, shake his hand and call him by name, gestures he returns.

Ming is an unfailingly nice man, even sharing a smile with fans who interrupt him between bites at lunch. Recent television exposure in Paris has brought him recognition few painters ever know.

Try imagining the notoriously irascible Cezanne chatting up tourists viewing his Card Players.

Ming not only takes time to answer guest questions about his work, he’ll often open the engagement by approaching onlookers who don’t know who he is.

Think about your next visit to one of the world’s great art museums and having someone tap you on the shoulder and say, “that painting there, I did it; what do you think?

Yan Pei-Ming was not invited to exhibit at the Orsay and Petit Palais because he’s a nice guy who’s willing to shake hands. Ming’s work hangs there because at 59, the Shanghai, China-born painter who now calls Dijon, France home has worked his way into being one of the most powerful contemporary artists in the world, renown for taking on stern painterly challenges. 

Most recently, his challenge was conversing with a titan of art history: Gustave Courbet. That’s what brought this work to Paris.

Courbet (1819-1877), a French painter of no less stature in his home country than Monet or Cezanne, is being celebrated nationwide on the bicentennial of his birth. Courbet’s hometown of Ornans led up to the anniversary by refurbishing his studio and acquiring the artist’s adjacent house. Here’s where Ming joins the story.

Ming had long been a Courbet devotee before moving to France in 1980. As a member of the socialist Paris Commune of 1871, Courbet was held up by Communist China as a shining example, bringing the Frenchman’s work into Ming’s awareness at an early age as Ming underwent his artistic training.

A visit to Ornans and conversations with guardians of Courbet’s property there led to Ming participating in the first artist residency on the site. Following the residency, an exhibition of the two artists’ work side-by-side at the Courbet Museum, also in Ornans, seemed a natural next step. The exhibit received prestigious official designation as an Exhibition of National Interest in France.

Yan Pei-Ming / Courbet, Face to Face moved from Ornans this past summer to the Petit Palais, rich with works from Courbet in its permanent collection. The exhibit will be on view through January 19, 2020.

Highlights of the show include two enormous portraits by Ming, one a self-portrait, the other, facing it across the gallery, of Courbet.

During Ming’s residency, with the help of the Gustave Courbet Institute, he discovered a photograph of Courbet, the last known photograph of him to exist. Courbet is 58-years-old in the picture. By an extraordinary coincidence, Ming was turning 58-years-old when he painted his self-portrait. The two artists not only face each other, they face each other at the same age.

Ming’s East of Eden, at nearly 13-by-20 feet, lords over the proceedings. Inky, muscular and violent, crocodiles, bears, lions, gorillas and eagles, snap, snarl, lunge, howl and screech as they fight for life–to eat, or be eaten. This tarlike painting’s hellish engagements occur feet from where the artist, dressed in jeans and New Balance sneakers on this day, cordially chats up museum guests.

For the Orsay exhibit, on view through January 12, 2020, Ming riffs on Courbet’s most famous painting: A Burial at Ornans. Ming responds with A Burial in Shanghai, three paintings and the exhibit bearing the same name.

A Burial at Ornans (1849-1850) was a radical picture in its day. Its depiction of a funeral for an ordinary citizen on the scale and with the care previously reserved in art history for popes and royalty shocked critics. The painting is massive: 10-feet-4-inches-by-21-feet-8-inches. Treating this “mundane” subject on this grandiose scale was a shot across the bow of art hierarchy by Courbet, something he’d make a habit of.

Courbet also allowed the burial’s visitors to grieve and sob for this average citizen as if it were a prince or general. Galling at the time.

Then there are the clearly disinterested children in attendance, the workaday faces of the clergy, merely performing the perfunctory responsibilities their jobs call for–what’s that dog doing there–it’s all so every day. Disarmingly so. Certainly not fit for the prestige of the French Salon or a museum.

At least not at the time.

Now it represents one of the many crown jewels in the permanent collection of the Orsay, one floor down from where Ming’s Burial triptych hangs.

Ming’s Burial features three paintings: a landscape, a portrait and a burial scene which covers the same dimensions as Courbet’s. That’s where the two part company.

Ming’s Burial doesn’t inter an ordinary citizen. Ming buries his mother.

“It was not the project I was thinking of at the beginning,” Ming said of his invitation from the Orsay to take inspiration from Courbet and run with it. “When she died, the project changed dramatically; I wanted to create something unique for my mother and the museum.”

And so he has.

A Burial in Shanghai is not about Corbet and an artist’s vanity in trying to stack-up against a master from long ago, it’s about a son wanting to honor his mother in the best way he knows how.

“It’s the most dignified way to pay homage to my mother,” Ming said. “When a son is a painter, he pays homage with painting; if I was a composer, I would have written a song, if I was a poet, I would have written a poem.”

Ming’s mother, who died in July of 2018, was a factory worker who knew nothing of art. That didn’t prevent her from encouraging her son to pursue it. He recalls her spending a month’s salary to purchase him a calligraphy set; of demanding the family eat standing up for a week so Ming could take over the dining table to work on a still life.

His recollections of those maternal sacrifices pour into this work, particularly the tender, loving portrait of his elderly mother.

“I worked for three months, night and day, painting with tears,” Ming recalls. “It’s the most accurate work I’ve done, a son paying homage to his mother; I hope now she’s still happy to have a son that’s a painter.”

Everyone represented in Ming’s burial scene knew Ming’s mother. Ming placed himself in the picture, his children, his wife, uncles–his own dog. He had never painted his own family previously.

“When there are tragedies, that’s the only time that all the family gathers,” Ming said.

While the scene pictured never occurred–the Chinese are cremated, not buried, for one–the painting’s sentiment has far more importance than its literal depiction.

“This work is about feelings and emotions and touching people,” Ming said. “I really want to attack the hurt of people, to make sure it strikes them, to share this emotion with people.”

Matching brushstrokes with history’s greatest artists inside the world’s greatest art venues is nothing new to Ming.

In 2009, the Louvre welcomed him for a confrontation with the Mona Lisa in a series of paintings titled The Funerals of Mona Lisa. In 1993 it was Caravaggio at the Villa Medici in Rome.

Ming is not, however, a derivative artist. He doesn’t lack for originality. Nor does he lack the confidence to pair himself against legendary names in legendary locales.

I never kneel in front of another artist. I like Courbet, of course–he’s staying downstairs–I concentrated on my painting, my work and my mother. Some artists are so impressed by other artists they can’t make anything. I must find my own way of seeing art and making art.