Yan Pei-Ming at Palazzo Strozzi
From 7 July to 3 September 2023 Palazzo Strozzi presents Yan Pei-Ming. Painter of stories, the largest exhibition ever dedicated in Italy to the French-Chinese artist, part of the Palazzo Strozzi Future Art project developed with the Hillary Merkus Recordati Foundation. Famous for a profound and passionate reflection on painting in today’s art, in his monumental canvases Yan Pei-Ming combines history and the contemporary, famous works of art, public figures and intimate subjects. Curated by Arturo Galansino, Director General of the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation, the exhibition offers an itinerary of over thirty works that allow us to explore the artist’s powerful and original research on the relationship between image and reality, in a short circuit between personal life and history collective, symbols and icons of culture and art history between East and West. Exploring genres such as portrait, landscape, still life and history painting, his paintings come to life starting from the model of photographic images extrapolated from different sources, such as personal images, newspaper covers, film stills or famous works of history of art.
Yan Pei-Ming was born in Shanghai in 1960 into a family of workers and grew up during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). His artistic skills soon made him noticed, but he was rejected at the Shanghai Art & Design School and, at the age of twenty, he emigrated to France by enrolling at the École des Beaux-Arts in Dijon in 1981 and later attending the Institut des Hautes études en Arts plastics in Paris. He works mainly in his studio in a former factory in Ivry-sur-Seine and lives between Dijon, Paris and Shanghai.
All the info on palazzostrozzi.org