Yanbei, the Chinese artist who is already painting post-covid in Portugal

He was tired of the pollution in Beijing, he dreamed of Canada to emigrate to and today it doesn’t even occur to him to leave Portugal, where he has lived with his wife and two children for more than five years. He continues to paint, now full of ideas again, but admits that the first period of confinement hampered his inspiration. He praises the Portuguese for the way they dealt with the pandemic.

Jinmo, 15, and Tianmo, 11, have been taking online classes since March, when the pandemic forced confinement, which is only now, after more than two months, beginning to be eased. “I increasingly feel that Portuguese is becoming their mother tongue and their studies are going very well”, comments his father, Guohui Zhang, better known by his artistic name Yanbei, a Chinese painter who since the end of 2014 has lived in Portugal and tries to maintain creativity even in times of covid-19. During the two months at home, only going out to buy food, he felt a little depressed, but now he is moving forward with the creation of two works, one entitled Covid-19 in the year Geng-zi , a reference to the Chinese sexagenarian cycle, and other Where did this virus come from? And what is the destiny of human beings?

The family settled in Cascais and it wasn’t just the children who adopted Portuguese, adding it to Mandarin. His mother, Haiqing Wang, also started studying Portuguese, in addition to English, and has already been tested and approved at some levels at the University of Lisbon. “I, on the other hand, don’t have a great talent for the language and I only speak Portuguese when I introduce myself or when I go to a restaurant”, says the painter, who makes himself understood with the help of an interpreter, just like the first time we spoke , two years ago, when Yanbei had an exhibition at the Macau Scientific and Cultural Center, in Lisbon, with some works already influenced by the Portuguese experience, such as a painting in which the Pena Palace, in Sintra, not far away, after all, was recognizable , where he lives.

From China, despite the pandemic, he has received good news, with all family members healthy. “They live in Pingu, in Beijing, the only district in the capital region without any cases”, he highlights. And he tells how he joined the efforts of the Chinese community in Portugal to help when the virus, first detected in Wuhan, arrived in Western Europe: “At the beginning of the pandemic, Portugal was short of masks, disinfectant alcohol gel and other materials and many immigrants from visa gold they made a big effort to help. I also participated in the donations, I hope I helped the country a little.” Yanbei is part of a recent group of Chinese immigrants, but the majority of the community in Portugal came long before special visas and originates from the coastal province of Zhejiang.

The exhibition I visited in Yanbei in October 2018, in the magnificent oriental mini-museum on Rua da Junqueira, was called Recomeçar . And that is exactly what this artist born in 1963 in Pingu (the so-called virus-averse district of Greater Beijing) did when, unable to emigrate to Canada, he chose Portugal on the advice of friends to pursue his career and raise his two children. And as soon as he visited the country for the first time, in 2013, to buy a house and apply for a golden visa , he was convinced: “I immediately liked Portugal, from what I saw. And I thought: not bad.” Meanwhile, Canada’s immigration laws have changed and the doors have opened for this Chinese family, but none of them want to move across the Atlantic. “We are doing very well here” , reaffirms Yanbei, who had several advertising companies in China, but who, tired of Beijing’s pollution – “it was even worse than now” – wanted a change of scenery.

The artist’s parents were practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, but as his childhood and adolescence coincided with the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong, Yanbei only began to receive more classical education, including the art of calligraphy, almost as an adult. “A lot has changed in China since the 1978 reforms”, explains the painter again, referring to Deng Xiaoping’s opening policy, two years after the death of Mao, the founder of the People’s Republic. After university studies in the capital, he was an art teacher and journalist, as well as a professional painter. Later he was an entrepreneur in the areas of advertising and environmental art, taking advantage of the times when the economy grew 10% per year, but without leaving painting, his “great passion”.

Yanbei started with paintings heavily influenced by Chinese patterns. This Chinese phase was represented in the exhibition two years ago, as were the subsequent ones. Then came the phase in which Portugal influenced him, “with its colors, its joy”. The next phase is more abstract. “Now I’m working on this concept based on fingerprints”, explained the painter in the report published in 2018, while taking a kind of guided tour. The technique used in the paintings was Indian ink and watercolor on paper, but he admitted to painting in oil in the future.

Also Chinese, Ai Weiwei is one of his favorite contemporary artists, because of his “social concern and humanist sympathy”. Among European painters, Rembrandt stands out, but also Van Gogh and, much closer to our time, Picasso.

The prosperity of recent decades in China, where the Communist Party maintained a monopoly on power but allowed economic reforms, created a great appetite for Western art among the population and boosted the global market, with Chinese tycoons competing with Arab sheikhs at major auctions. But with the pandemic everything changed and Yanbei confesses that he is “not at all optimistic about the recovery of the art market”. And he explains: “First of all, I think that the economic recovery will be a slow and painful process, and it will take even longer for the art market to recover than for the economic markets; secondly, this pandemic will change the way of exhibiting, as Instead of the traditional exhibition, the combination of online and offline exhibitions is the new trend and perhaps new formats will emerge in the future.”

Yanbei is a stage name that results from two words, Yan, which means goose, and Bei, which is north . And, he says, it is always in the spring that the goose returns to the north, that it begins again, which is what this Chinese family did in Portugal, integrating, learning the language, especially the children, although, the artist confesses, the children instead of the ultra-popular football are more interested in hockey, tennis and basketball. And this period of crisis, experienced in Portugal, made the artist reflect a little on the role of art, also on humanity and the future of the world, and also on the country where he chose to make his artistic creation: “There is an old proverb in China who says that friends see each other in difficult times. This pandemic has been a disaster for people all over the world. During this period I have felt the kindness and friendship of the Portuguese. make a great effort against the virus. I feel at peace with myself for being here and I believe that my decision to live in Portugal was the right one. I sincerely thank the Portuguese government and people for the way they dealt with the pandemic.”

by Leonídio Paulo Ferreira
Diário de Notícias
(English translation from Portuguese original.)