Yan Pei-Ming Catalogue

Un enterrement à Shanghai

What’s the difference between seeing art in person and looking at a reproduction? There are lots of differences, of course, but perhaps the most important is experiencing the size of the work. Usually reproductions are smaller than the originals. In the case of Yan Pei-Ming they are comparatively tiny. If you know his paintings from books and then see them in real life you will probably be surprised by their dimensions. The painting Un enterrement à Shanghai (L’adieu), that represents the funeral of the artist’s mother, is more than 6 × 3m, with rapid brushstrokes. Your perception of the painting will change depending on the distance from which you look at it. Up close, you’ll see a collection of greys, brushstrokes and details. From far away it forms an impressive image. This catalogue gives the viewer the ability to feel these differences as well as to reconstruct the work in its actual size thanks to the pages that can be trimmed and rebuilt as a puzzle. The size of 315 × 688 cm has been divided into 290 sections that are 23.7 × 31.5 cm. The order of each piece of the painting goes from top to bottom and from left to right as in the way the Chinese read and write, appropriately for Ming who lives in Europe but whose homeland is China. It becomes a sort of visual metaphor of how the East meets West and the West meets East.