Chinese artist Mao Yan explains German landscape artist Caspar David Friedrich’s influence on his style
- Celebrated portrait artist Mao Yan, who had a painting sell for US$3.16 million in 2020, talks about being intimidated by Friedrich’s The Monk of the Sea
- Mao works from photos and has a distinctive style, often using shades of grey and the sfumato style of blending tones. He recently started painting landscapes
When Mao Yan was a student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, in Beijing, in the late 1980s, he chanced upon a photograph of The Monk by the Sea, a painting by the German artist Caspar David Friedrich from around 1810. Mao marvelled at its moody palette of blues and greys, especially the hazy band where the two colours met on the horizon.
He was simultaneously impressed and intimidated, so much so that he promised himself on the spot that he would never make landscape paintings. “That painting is transcendent. If I couldn’t reach that level, there was no point,” Mao says.
So Mao became a portraitist – a celebrated one. His paintings have been exhibited around the world, collected by major museums, including Hong Kong’s M+, and sell for eight figures at auction.
In December 2020, China Guardian auction house in Beijing sold his painting Black Rose of Memory or Dancing for 20.7 million yuan (just over HK$23 million, or US$3.16 million).
Late last year, Mao had his largest exhibition to date at the Song Art Museum in Beijing and, on January 18, opened a show of new works at the London outpost of Pace Gallery, the global mega-gallery that represents him. That exhibition, New Paintings, runs until March 9.
Mao’s new portraits showcase his distinctive style. He normally paints friends or family, rather than professional models, and always works from photographs rather than from life.
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He positions his sitters against a featureless background, leaving them floating in empty space, untethered from any marker of identity. To further distance his works from a specific time or place, Mao often restricts his palette to shades of grey. He developed this style in the early 1990s.
“I wanted to get away from the atmosphere of the Chinese art scene at that time,” he explains. “Many artists in China were choosing the setting of China, the subject of China, for their work. I didn’t think I had the ability to do it as well as some other artists.”
During that period, Mao’s contemporaries such as Yue Minjun and Wang Guangyi were shooting to global fame with paintings featuring stereotypically Chinese symbols, such as Mao suits and blue-and-white porcelain.
While his contemporaries used art to explore their own culture, Mao went looking for inspiration outside – in particular in European art history and the work of artists like Friedrich.
Studying the masters of European art history, Mao became particularly interested in sfumato, a Renaissance painting technique of gradually shading colours into one another, creating soft, imperceptible transitions between tones.
He has incorporated sfumato into almost all of his paintings ever since, most notably in the murky, cloudlike backgrounds of his greyscale portraits, which sometimes echo the mist that shrouds many of Friedrich’s landscapes.
Mao says he uses sfumato to try to draw viewers’ attention to the paint itself.
“In the past, I didn’t like when people called me a portrait painter, although I’m more easy-going now,” he says. “People talk about my paintings being about people, but actually my paintings are about painting, the paint itself.”
In fact, Mao says that in his portraits he is not particularly interested in capturing a likeness of the sitter, or anything about the sitter at all. Instead, Mao says painting portraits is simply a way for him to learn something new about painting.
“Some models will help my understanding of light, for example,” Mao says. “My paintings are not really about capturing details of the human body, it’s about myself, about applying myself to the canvas.
“For me, the finished work is not important. What is important is what I experienced, what I saw, what I felt during the painting process.”
This interest in painting, rather than specifically in portraiture, has led Mao to start experimenting with other styles over the past few years. His show at Pace features a painting of two cats alongside his studies of people and, in a more dramatic move away from portraiture, Mao has also started making abstract paintings.
He first exhibited these at the Song Art Museum and is showcasing several new ones at Pace, which feature small geometric shapes set into the same grey backgrounds as Mao’s portraits.
“They look abstract, but every technique is from the portrait paintings,” he says. “People think abstract painting is a big contrast to my portrait painting, but actually it’s complementary.”
Now that he has exhibited abstract paintings, Mao is pushing himself in yet another new direction, one he swore he would never go in: landscape painting.
“I have made some landscape paintings recently. I hope to exhibit them,” he says. “I still have many, many things I hope to paint that I have not started yet.
“It’s very important to keep pushing yourself. That is the one thing artists should try to do: keep pushing yourself. Do not repeat yourself.”
