Educational Media Reviews Online

Artist Yan Pei-Ming is known for his large-scale portraits of big figures of pop culture and history. Early in his career while still residing in his birthplace of Shanghai, China, the artist was recruited to produce propagandist art during Mao Zedong’s regime. Since that time, Pei-Ming has been creating work that reexamines how audiences see images and figures of ubiquity into giant gestural works.

The film Yan Pei-Ming: Face to Face, director Michel Quinejure zooms in to profile the artist in intimate detail as he creates work for an exhibition at France’s Musée d'Orsay. The documentary tracks Pei-Ming's rise to prominence through his works while also placing the viewer in the middle of meetings with the artist and important figures in the French art world as they plan an exhibition that incorporates his work alongside Gustave Coubert. It’s an interesting and candid look into an artist’s culmination and the rumination upon their life and influences.

Yan Pei-Ming: Face to Face can be very useful as an example of contemporary artist’s working process as well as a glimpse into the collaborative process between a museum and an artist as they plan a major exhibition. Courses dealing with art history and contemporary art would benefit from this film’s content. This film is recommended.

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