Hadrien de Montferrand Gallery is honored to present Mao Yan “Works on Paper”, the first solo show of Mao Yan’s works on paper. Mao Yan was born in Xingtan, HuNan province in 1968, he graduated from the oil painting department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1991. He has exhibited worldwide: Espace Pierre Cardin, Paris, France; Denmark’s Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; National Gallery, San Paolo, Brazil; Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Belvue Museum, Brussels, Belgium...His work belongs to the collections of: Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; Upriver Gallery, Chengdu; Dong Yu Art Museum, Shanghai; Feng Pingshan Museum, Hong Kong University, Hong Kong; Shenzhen Art Museum, Shenzhen.
Mao Yan’s production has focused on portraiture. He rst adopted a conven- tional style, painting full length portraits of his friends and the intellectual circles of Nanjing. He then attempted to remove himself emotionally from his subject to con- centrate on form and color. He himself said he didn’t “pay more attention to representation of individuality”. To this end he painted numerous portraits of a westerner called Thomas, a Luxembourger studying Chinese in NanJing.
His recent works have shown a new direction yet again. During the summer of 2010, he took part in the prestigious Glen ddich Artists Residency Program that aims to foster dialogue berween artists of different nationali- ties in the city of Dufftown in Scotland. His residency in Scotland led him to paint portraits of a wide range of people from different backgrounds with an enlarged palette of colors.