Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, it’s time to talk about Yan Pei-Ming, born in 1960 in Shanghai, an artist who turned his brushes into weapons of mass destruction against our visual comfort. With his monumental canvases that slap you the moment you step into an exhibition room, he imposes his brutal, uncompromising vision of our era. While the contemporary art world is obsessed with concept and minimalism, he still believes in the raw power of painting.
The first characteristic of his work is an almost pathological obsession with monumental portraiture. His giant faces, rendered in black and white or red and white, are not mere representations—they are physical manifestations of power and its fragility. When he paints Mao, it’s not just an exercise in style; it’s a violent confrontation with history. His portraits of the Chinese leader are like specters haunting our collective consciousness, reminding us that power is only a temporary illusion. Walter Benjamin understood this well when he spoke of the aura of artwork—but here, Yan Pei-Ming flips the concept on its head, creating an anti-aura that desacralizes everything it touches.
His furious brushstrokes, these brutal marks left by massive brushes, are not meant to please. They tear through the canvas surface like Lucio Fontana slashed his paintings, but instead of creating slits in the canvas, Yan Pei-Ming opens wounds in our perception of reality. When he paints Obama, Putin, or Bin Laden, he doesn’t make their portraits—he dissects their public images with the clinical precision of a mad surgeon. Roland Barthes would have loved seeing how he deconstructs these contemporary “mythologies”, reducing them to their rawest essence.
Look at how he treats the figure of Napoleon in his painting Napoleon Crowning Himself Emperor – Violet from 2017, inspired by a preparatory sketch by Jacques-Louis David. The emperor crowns himself, a gesture of sublime arrogance summarizing the hubris of power. The choice of violet is not accidental—it’s the imperial color par excellence, but also a color of mourning in some cultures. Yan Pei-Ming thus creates a portrait that is both a celebration and a condemnation of absolute power.
This ambivalence is also found in his series of Mao portraits. As a former propaganda painter during the Cultural Revolution, he knows intimately the power of political imagery. But instead of perpetuating the myth, he deconstructs it. His Maos are no longer untouchable icons but spectral presences staring at us with a disconcerting intensity. Julia Kristeva spoke of the abject in art—these portraits are its perfect embodiment, both attractive and repulsive.
The second characteristic of his work is his visceral relationship with death and the violence of history. His paintings of executions, portraits of corpses, and apocalyptic landscapes are not here to entertain. They confront us with the brutality of our time with a painful honesty. When he paints the body of Aldo Moro in the trunk of a red Renault 4 or Pasolini’s body on the beach of Ostia, it’s not for sensationalism—he forces us to look at what we would rather ignore. It’s Theodor Adorno in painting, a living demonstration that making art after Auschwitz is only possible by accepting to show horror without embellishment.
His Execution, After Goya from 2012 is particularly revealing in this regard. Revisiting The Third of May 1808, he doesn’t just copy the Spanish master—he updates his message for our time. The bodies of the victims on the ground disappear, replaced by white paint stains that seem to irradiate the canvas. This absence makes the scene even more violent because it forces us to imagine the horror rather than see it directly. Jacques Rancière spoke of the “distribution of the sensible”—well, Yan Pei-Ming redefines this distribution by forcing us to take a stand, to choose our side in this eternally replayed scene of violence.
The way he handles his self-portraits is equally ruthless. In his triptych Nom d’un chien! Un jour parfait, he depicts himself in the pose of the crucified Christ, wearing nothing but denim shorts. It’s a biting irony that would have made Nietzsche smile—the artist sacrificing himself on the altar of contemporary art, but keeping his everyday clothes. There’s a tension between the sacred and the profane here, echoing Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on profanation as a political act.
His landscape paintings are just as violent as his portraits. In East of Eden, a monumental 4-by-6-meter canvas, he creates an apocalyptic universe where animals tear at each other in the darkness. It’s Thomas Hobbes in painting—the war of all against all, nature in all its primitive brutality. The brushstrokes seem to have been made in pure rage, as if the artist were trying to exorcize the very violence he depicts.
The series he created during the COVID-19 pandemic takes this apocalyptic vision even further. His 2020 diptych Pandemic shows a hazmat-suited figure on the outskirts of Paris, surrounded by body bags. The use of black and white reaches an almost unbearable level of drama here. The agitated brushstrokes create an atmosphere of pure anxiety, perfectly capturing the spirit of the time. It’s as if Francis Bacon had painted a war reportage.
This year, in Florence, he exhibited The Funeral of Mona Lisa, a pentaptych where he transforms Leonardo’s icon into a monumental memento mori. He stretches the landscape behind the Mona Lisa into two immense lateral canvases, creating a funerary space where death lingers in every brushstroke. On the sides, he places his dying father and himself on his deathbed—a meditation on finitude that would have fascinated Martin Heidegger. This is no longer just a dialogue with art history; it’s an existential confrontation with our mortality.
The most interesting aspect of Yan Pei-Ming might be his ability to create a unique synthesis between East and West. He takes traditional European oil painting techniques and combines them with the gesturality of Chinese calligraphy, creating a style that transcends cultural boundaries. When he paints Buddha or his deceased mother, there’s something reminiscent of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the flesh of the world—these figures emerge from the pictorial matter like apparitions, halfway between presence and absence.
His portraits of his mother, made after her death in 2018, are particularly poignant. In My Mother, a 3.5-by-3.5-meter canvas, the old woman’s face looks directly at us, emerging from a complex network of brushstrokes that resemble a rain of tears. It’s as if the artist were trying to hold on to his mother’s image through the very materiality of paint. Next to it, he places Celestial Paradise for My Mother, a landscape where shadow-like branches stretch across misty mountains. The juxtaposition creates a silent dialogue between portrait and landscape, between presence and absence, between the world of the living and the dead.
The way he handles color is just as radical. His use of black and white or red and white is not merely an aesthetic choice—it’s a philosophical position. By reducing his palette to these fundamental oppositions, he creates a pictorial space where nuance no longer exists, where everything becomes a matter of life or death. It’s Carl Schmitt in painting—friend or foe, no middle ground. Even when he introduces a third color, like violet in his Napoleon portrait or emerald green in his Buddha, it’s to create tension rather than harmony.
His technique itself is a form of controlled violence. He paints with massive brushes, some as large as brooms, in a physically demanding process that resembles a fight more than traditional creation. The traces of these battles remain visible on the canvas—drips, splatters, areas where the paint has been brutally wiped away. It’s painting that bears the scars of its own creation.
His way of addressing current events is just as brutal. His recent portraits of Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, based on TIME magazine covers, turn these media images into tragic icons of our era. The very format of these works—triptychs in watercolor—suggests a kind of secular altarpiece, where figures of power replace the saints of old. It’s a way of showing how contemporary media has replaced religion in constructing our collective myths.
And yet, despite all this violence, there is a profound humanity in his work. When he paints his mother, in these monumental portraits made after her death, there’s a tenderness that transcends the brutality of his technique. This might be Yan Pei-Ming’s true genius: his ability to show us that even in the darkest depths of our time, a glimmer of humanity remains. A fragile, flickering glimmer, but persistent.
His art constantly reminds us that we live in an era of violent contradictions. On the one hand, we’ve created societies of unprecedented technological sophistication; on the other, we continue to kill each other over ideologies and power. Yan Pei-Ming’s portraits are relentless witnesses to this fundamental contradiction.
Yan Pei-Ming paints our time as it is: brutal, complex, contradictory. He holds up a mirror that reflects not what we want to see, but what we truly are. And if that makes you uncomfortable, all the better—that’s exactly what he aims to do. In a world that often prefers to look away, his work forces us to keep our eyes wide open.