“The Yan Pei-Ming Show”

“The Yan Pei-Ming Show” is a work by many hands, with contributions from Piotr Uklanski and Huang Yong Ping, under the direction of Chinese artist Yan Pei-Ming. Walking into the gallery, one has the feeling of coming in the back door, since the rear facade of a small, meticulously constructed stall filled with Eastern wares—Huang’s Marché de Punya, 2007—has been placed at the entrance. A short distance away stand two lifelike sculptures, also by Huang—a gigantic elephant carcass and a dog. Something about the animals and the Eastern emporium is at once unreal and absolutely credible. For example, compared with the small shop, the bulky elephant collapsed on the floor seems so large that the viewer assumes its scale has been exaggerated, though it is in fact rendered life-size.

The upper floor of the gallery contains Yan’s gigantic portrait of the last emperor of China, Pu-Yi (Last Emperor—Pu Yi, 2007), and the artist’s series of large-scale paintings on the subject of death. Yan’s chromatic palette has become increasingly light, now tending toward white, the color that, in Eastern tradition, symbolizes mourning.