Yan Pei-Ming, Un enterrement à Shanghai @ Musée d'Orsay

Yan Pei-Ming, L'Adieu, 2019

This autumn, Paris welcomes one of contemporary art's rising stars, the Chinese-French painter Yan Pei-Ming, into two of its most prestigious and celebrated museums. In this exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay, Pei-Ming's enormous triptych, Un enterrement à Shanghai, made specifically for the museum in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Courbet's birthday, is an interpretation, or better, revivification of one of the early French realist painter's famous, Enterrement à Ornans.

Gustave Courbet, Enterrement à Ornans, 1849-50

One of the admirable practices of French State museums such as the Musée d'orsay is their invitation to contemporary artists to exhibit or curate within their walls. This is intended to show the ongoing relevance and inspiration of their collections. Some artists, such as Julian Schnabel, who occupied the same rooms at the Musée d'Orsay a year ago, integrate works from the collection into an exhibition together with their own works. Pei-Ming has chosen to paint his own version of a burial by replacing Courbet's dour and depressing depiction of events in Ornan (Courbet's home town), with his mother's burial in Shanghai. Pei-Ming has painted the scene of his mother's funeral in his familiar swathes of grey paint—in every possible shade and tone, applied with brushes of all sizes, rollers, spatulas. Pei-Ming's process is unique: he holds a photograph in one hand and the instrument of painting in the other, glancing at the photograph while he composes on the canvas. While the process is consistent, this and the other two paintings in room 58 at the Musée d'Orsay look to have been painted with different approaches, using different techniques to create diverse effects. In the other two images, Pei-Ming moves from the realist detail of his mother's eyes to a highly expressionist, all but abstract, application of grey paint in a landscape representing the future resting place of her spirit.

Yan Pei-Ming, Ma Mère, 2019

If Courbet breaks all the rules of painting in the nineteenth century, by placing his mother in the central panel of the triptych hung across three walls, Pei-Ming pushes convention and credibility even further. His mother, sensitively painted with soft eyes and delicate hands looks inquiringly out of the painting, and as she clutches at the bedclothes, the sheets could be mistaken as the head of a dying child. The reference to the Virgin is thus assumed. And at 5m x 4m, this painting of his mother is monumental. If Courbet put the everyday world on the map of art history, Pei-Ming blows up the importance of the intimate reality of an ordinary life with an oversized portrait of his mother as a holy figure. Until, that is, we recognize its placement at the centre, inevitably referencing the image most commonly as the centre panel: the dying Christ on the cross.

Yan Pei-Ming, Montagne Céleste, 2019
detail

Yan Pei-Ming, Montagne Céleste, 2019
detail

The first image, Montagne Céleste, is different again. The free and oversized strokes of paint verge into abstraction. I noticed that it was the least appealing of the three tableaux for the visitors, most of whom were fascinated by the burial scene. Of course, this makes sense because its near-abstraction gives spectators little to hold onto. However, I found it compelling; the different shades, the light and dark, the air and the earth are orchestrated across this enormous canvas in a symphony of greys. The predominantly vertical brushstrokes, have the appearance of being painted very quickly, fast and loose, some dripping their colour, others almost transparent with luminosity.

Yan Pei-Ming, L'Adieu, 2019
detail of monks

In contrast, the dark grey skies hanging over the skyline of Shanghai, the monks hovering in the background like spectres oversee a different atmosphere altogether in L'Adieu, the funeral panel. It's difficult not to see the darker  greys as a more foreboding vision of smog and perhaps even the darkness of daily life in Shanghai. That said, like Courbet's Funeral at Ornans, it's tempting to reach for metaphorical explanations, even as the events and their background are decidedly ambiguous.