The unbearable shortness of being

Yan is one of the first Chinese artists to have settled abroad and developed an international career after the opening-up and reform.

Yan says that when he was 13, he was already "sincerely, seriously" considering being an artist. At 18, he tried to get into the Shanghai Art and Design Academy but was rejected because of his stutter. He says speaking was not his strength, and it was only through art, he found a language with which he could express himself properly.

"I was disappointed," Yan says of the rejection.

In 1982, he decided to go to stay with an uncle in Paris. The following year he enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, working in a Chinese restaurant to support himself.

"In China, teachers judged paintings and taught us how to draw, but they care little about the students' ideas behind the paintings. In the (Dijon) school, the teachers guided us to think about why we wanted to make a painting and what we were trying to express. It was a period when I found and built up my own identity."

After he graduated, he settled in the city and rented a studio with some of his classmates. In 1987, he began to do enormous portraits executed in either black and white or white and red, which developed into his signature style. One of his subjects was Mao Zedong, whom he painted often before leaving China.

"At the time, no one in France knew Yan Peiming but everyone knew Mao Zedong, so painting Mao was a sort of strategy to promote myself as a painter."

The strategy worked well and people began to notice him. In 1991, he held his first solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and finally put an end to 10 years of painting during the day and washing dishes at night.