'Yan Pei-Ming, the master unleashes the beasts' Visit of the Franco-Chinese artist's studio in Dijon

A few days away from the opening of his first exhibition at the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery the Franco-Chinese artist, who is set to surprise viewers with his new animal series, put down his brushes for a moment and opened up his studio in Dijon. The Burgundian capital is where it all began for him...

By Raphaël Morata

Behind the smoke curling from a Cuban Hoyo de Monterrey cigar, Yan Pei-Ming's face is focused. Sitting in a timeless armchair stained with paint, the master silently stares at a wall where a group of noisy monkeys seem to be striking a pose. The oil paint on the canvases has not yet dried. The primates could almost escape.

So Yan Pei-Ming gets busy. He must finish this animal series before the end of the day, because in 48 hours, all his works will have to leave his Dijon studio, still ‘a little damp’, for the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Pantin where they will be presented during the Eye to Eye exhibition. 

To face this predatory countdown, he has unleashed the beasts, so to speak. Working tirelessly from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. to bring to life this troupe of lions with their disturbing gazes, these primates wilder and more enigmatic than those of Kipling revisited by Disney, he completed his gallery of self-portraits in order to follow in the footsteps of Rembrandt, whose ‘work on the face, a marker of the passage of time and a dreamt-of eternity’.

In this pictorial frenzy, the artist savours these stressful moments when life appears to him in all its density, in all its truth. 'I like to face this urgency by telling myself: 'You have no choice!'' 

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(Translated)