Artist to Participate in Opening Celebration and Programming

SAN DIEGO- April 1, 2025 - In April, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego will unveil A Burial in Shanghai featuring an epic cycle of paintings that offer a meditation on family, mortality, and art history by the Chinese artist Yan Pei-Ming (b. 1960), one of the world's most celebrated figurative painters. Three monumental canvases, Celestial Mountain, The Farewell, and My Mother, collectively titled A Burial in Shanghai, will be presented in the United States for the first time following their debut at Paris’s famed Musée d’Orsay in 2019. The artist will be present for opening events.

In the early 1990s, Yan Pei-Ming emerged as part of a generation of Chinese artists who came of age during the Cultural Revolution. After moving to France as a student, the artist adapted the realistic style he learned in China to create powerful portraits of global cultural figures. Painted entirely in shades of black and white, his expressive style became immediately recognizable. In the decades since, his work has repeatedly referenced art history to highlight the human condition and issues of mortality.

Yan Pei-Ming’s commanding works convey psychological intensity despite their monochromatic restraint. He creates emotional portraits of renowned figures and friends that update traditional formats with contemporary resonance. The artist alludes to Western art history and his own biography in A Burial in Shanghai. Comprised of three outsized canvases, the central composition, The Farewell, echoes Gustav Courbet’s (1819-1877) celebrated painting from two-hundred years earlier, A Burial at Ornans (1849-1850). Courbet, a French painter who led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting was also an innovator and an artist willing to make bold social statements through his work.

Celestial Mountain, the largest painting measures 16 by 24 feet; the portrait of the artist’s mother looms at 16 by 13 feet; and the burial scene, The Farewell, matches the dimensions of Courbet’s historic painting at 16 by 24 feet. All three will be displayed in the Iris and Matthew Strauss West Gallery of the Selldorf Architect designed expansion. The opportunity to present such colossal works would not have been possible without the Museum’s recent renovation.

Yan’s work can be found in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Shanghai Art Museum, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, among others. He lives and works in Dijon, France.

MCASD is honored to have received support from Villa Albertine for this exhibition.