Yan Pei-Ming Eye to Eye

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In formats ranging from the monumental to the intimate, Yan Pei-Ming’s first solo exhibition at the Pantin gallery features a spectrum of subjects – lions and monkeys; Pablo Picasso and the artist himself as Pope – all interspersed with self-portraits. Bridging the animal and the human, the mythical and the personal, tradition and spontaneity, the works on view isolate the shared life force that the artist seeks to articulate across his portraiture practice.

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Yan Pei-Ming’s work is invariably indebted to the history of European painting, but in recent years he has increasingly drawn upon his Chinese heritage in combination with Western traditions. In the exhibition, he repeatedly rehearses the motif of the lion, whose art-historical significance resonates across periods and cultures.

 

Yan Pei-Ming

Wild Majesty, Blue, 2025

Oil on canvas

200 x 250 x 3.5 cm (78.74 x 98.43 x 1.38 in)

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The two lions that stand sentinel, flanking the entrance of the Pantin gallery, recall the Chinese tradition of guardian lions: an architectural ornament believed to have powerful protective benefits when placed at the entrances of buildings.

Yan Pei-Ming
Wild Majesty, 2025
Oil on canvas
200 x 250 x 3.5 cm (78.74 x 98.43 x 1.38 in)

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The artist, whose Dijon studio is stacked high with books on the European Old Masters, also cites Peter Paul Rubens’s Daniel in the Lions’ Den (1614–16), as well as Eugène Delacroix’s depictions of the creature, as influences for his own paintings. The theatricality of Rubens or the romantic drama of Delacroix are transposed into Yan Pei-Ming’s own distinctive painterly language of impassioned brushstrokes and drips of paint.

 

Yan Pei-Ming
Lions of the Wild Lands, 2025
Oil on canvas
260 x 400 x 4.5 cm (102.36 x 157.48 x 1.77 in)

 

Peter Paul Rubens

Daniel in the Lions’ Den , 1614–16

National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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The artist does not execute preparatory sketches before putting brush to canvas: instead, he works directly in paint, forming his figures layer after layer. Though his new works testify to the expressive approach for which he is recognised, he describes them as ‘less impulsive than before’. In the last layer of paint, in particular, he solidifies each image with an intentionality that belies its almost abstract aspect when viewed from up close.

Yan Pei-Ming
Lions, Beauty in the Wild, 2025
Oil on canvas
260 x 400 x 4.5 cm (102.36 x 157.48 x 1.77 in)

Eugène Delacroix
La Chasse aux lions, 1855
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

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The culminating point of the exhibition is a monumental work in three parts: Autoportrait en trois personnes (2020), first exhibited at the Palais des Papes in Avignon in 2021. It is made up of two self-portraits that wing a third, central self-portrait of the artist as Pope. Though Yan Pei-Ming, who was born and raised in Shanghai, did not grow up immersed in the iconography of Christianity, it holds a longstanding magnetism for him on account of its centrality to art history, and he first took a Pope as a subject in 2003.

Yan Pei-Ming

Autoportrait en trois personnes, 2020

Oil on canvas

300 x 250 x 4 cm (118.11 x 98.43 x 1.57 in) x 4 panels
300 x 400 x 4 cm (118.11 x 157.48 x 1.57 in) x 2 panels

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Yan Pei-Ming Autoportrait en trois personnes, 2020 Oil on canvas 300 x 250 x 4 cm (118.11 x 98.43 x 1.57 in) x 4 panels 300 x 400 x 4 cm (118.11 x 157.48 x 1.57 in) x 2 panels

In this 2020 work, through his ‘hybridisation’ of the recurring themes of the portrait of the Pope and the self-portrait, as curator Henri Loyrette described it, Yan Pei-Ming ‘extends the introspection of the self-portrait into autofiction, [...] as if, to quote Rimbaud, he wanted to run through “all the lives owed to him.”’ The work functions like a triptych, a format used since early Christian art and often identified with altarpieces, while its multipart structure provides a sense of narrative, which is carried throughout the exhibition in the sequentiality and dialogue between the faces that stare back at the visitor.

The pope is the favourite subject of all painters. It is the history of painting that interests me. Leo XIV represents continuity, both in my own paintings of the pope, and as a subject in the history of painting – for contemporary popes to be present, too.  — Yan Pei-Ming

Yan Pei-Ming
Portrait of Leon XIV, 2025
Oil on canvas
200.5 x 170.5 x 4 cm (78.94 x 67.13 x 1.57 in)

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Self-portraiture has been central to Yan Pei-Ming’s practice since he began making art. From monumental canvases to intimate works on oval supports that recall the Renaissance tradition of the portrait miniature – the artist’s first time working on shaped canvases – his new body of self-portraits demonstrates his continued investigation into questions of self-representation by taking up and reworking diverse art-historical conventions.

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Woven throughout each of the Pantin gallery’s three spaces, his self-portraits are a constant presence in the exhibition, confronting and conversing with the other works in a game of reflections and exchanged glances – each one ‘eye to eye’ with the next – that invites the visitor to meditate on their commonalities.

Yan Pei-Ming

Portrait of a Gorilla & Self-Portrait, 2025

Oil on canvas

Canvas (each) 200 x 200 x 3.5 cm (78.74 x 78.74 x 1.38 in)

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Yan Pei-Ming Portrait of a Gorilla & Self-Portrait, 2025 Oil on canvas Canvas (each) 200 x 200 x 3.5 cm (78.74 x 78.74 x 1.38 in)

The mythical figure of Pablo Picasso exerts a particular influence on Yan Pei-Ming, who has always been interested in portraying personalities who occupy our collective imagination. The artist captures a young Picasso’s penetrating, challenging gaze as he looks straight towards the viewer from beneath drips of paint.

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Yan Pei-Ming’s choice to recreate this particular scene reveals his fascination with the power of portraiture and its capacity to betray the life and the personality that lie within every subject, but also his interest in ideas of ancestry. As he explains, he paints Picasso as the ancestor of all modern painters, just as he paints the gorilla as a reminder of its shared ancestry with all modern humanity.

 

Yan Pei-Ming
Young Picasso and His Sister – Permanent Rose, 2024
Oil on canvas
200 x 200 x 4 cm (78.74 x 78.74 x 1.57 in)

 

Portrait of Pablo Picasso and his sister Lola in Málaga, 1888
Musée national Picasso-Paris

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The myth that surrounds Picasso is immense because it encompasses both his work and his life. There are two myths, as it were. For me, Picasso’s work is the absolute benchmark of modernity. — Yan Pei-Ming

The artist also depicts simians: the animal that, as he put it, bridges the gap between human and the other, and ‘our reflection’. Indeed, in Chinese culture in particular, they are often used as a metaphor for people. In traditional folk religion, they are regarded as supernatural creatures able to shapeshift between monkey and human form.

Yan Pei-Ming
Monkey in the Heart of the Jungle, 2025
Oil on canvas
104 x 144 x 2.5 cm (40.94 x 56.69 x 0.98 in)

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The feral nature of the subject matter aligns perfectly with Yan Pei-Ming’s painting style; in his own words, ‘It is an uncontrollable force that you control. It is something like people who do martial arts. They master their movements perfectly. They no longer need to practice them. They have a perfect understanding of the sequences. It’s a bit the same when you add a brushstroke, the other follows. But at the same time, unconsciously, there is an unexpected freedom.’

 

Yan Pei-Ming
Monkey, Eye to Eye, 2025
Oil on canvas117 x 162 x 2.5 cm (46.06 x 63.78 x 0.98 in)

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‘Presence, extraordinary presence is what characterizes the actors featured’, wrote art historian Hans-Joachim Müller on Yan Pei-Ming’s ability to bring together diverse subjects into a single, unified body of paintings; ‘and what unites them to an ensemble’. It is this fundamental essence of the portrait that Yan Pei-Ming distils in the works on view.

Yan Pei-Ming
Monkey, Eyes Turned Away, 2025
Oil on canvas
65 x 90 x 2.5 cm (25.59 x 35.43 x 0.98 in)

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His self-portraits are an act of ‘looking at himself as somebody else’, as curator Francesco Bonami wrote in the 2017 Rizzoli monograph on the artist; in the same way, his portraits of Picasso, or even those of monkeys might be said to look into their subjects’ eyes with the same understanding and depth as if the artist were looking into his own eyes in a mirror.

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‘I am interested in the human in general’, the artist explained. ‘My work can be seen as a universal portrait. Deep down, what I paint is a version of this humanity.’ His new body of portraits embody this equality, even impartiality, in his treatment of different subjects: what critic Philippe Dagen once called Yan Pei-Ming’s ‘yearning for universality’.