On the occasion of Mao Yan's exhibition of new paintings at Pace's London gallery, Dr. Katie Hill will chair a discussion between Dr. Malcolm McNeill and Professor Joanna Woodall, exploring the artist's iconic representational portraits, recent abstract experimentation, and the dynamic interplay between Chinese and Western art history embedded within his practice.

 

As one of the most influential figures of contemporary art in China, Mao has established a reputation for his spectral portraits of friends, hazily rendered in blue grey sfumato—a compositional device that he deems a subject in itself. Over the past decade, he has continued to delve into the expressive depth of classical painterly process, alongside technical innovation, as tools to explore the relationship between art and life. 

 

While Mao's portraits are rigorously constructed and refined in private from photographs taken by the artist, his recent experiments have introduced a looser and richer approach to this structure. For two years, Mao focused on paper explorations, involving a multitude of ink experiments and continuous poetry writing, before returning to oil painting in 2021. This shift brought new opportunities for meaning in the medium, coinciding with the merging of Mao's theoretical interest in abstraction with his signature figuration. These converging artistic languages, each possessing different intensities within Mao’s work, intersect in Mao Yan: New Paintings.

 

Professor Joanna Woodall, author of the seminal work Portraiture: Facing the Subject (1997), and Dr. Malcolm McNeill, a leading authority on contemporary Chinese art, will provide invaluable insights into Mao Yan's practice. Facilitated by Dr. Katie Hill, the discussion promises to illuminate Mao's contemporary transformation of classical painting language and investigate portrayals of the self and spiritual essence in cultural and artistic contexts today.

The discussion will begin at 18:30 and run for 40 minutes, followed by a 10-minute Q&A. Visitors are invited to view the exhibition from 18:00 onward. 

Accessibility information:
The event will take place on the ground floor. The lower ground floor is accessible via a lift. 
There is an all-gender disabled WC on the lower ground floor.