This exhibition explores his work through three techniques: paintings, photographs and carved stone steles.

These three kinds of work have allowed the artist to express his perception with a mixture of western (pastels, paper) and Chinese (calligraphy, ink on paper for the steles) techniques, ancient and modern art traditions. Yang Hui tries to find an answer to the very changes of modern life.

Pastel on paper:
The 36 portraits in this pastel on paper collection allude to "500 Old Chinese people". Drawing inspiration from his photographic work, the artist uses black pastel on paper, to draw bold portraits of this older generation of Chinese. These paintings reveal his search for new techniques with ancestral materials.

Photographs:
His photographic work is presented through a video with 500 photographs of 500 Old Chinese people. These photographs have been taken by the artist in the few remaining tea houses from small villages in Zhejiang Province. Shot very early in the morning, YANG HUI’s photographs have evocatively captured this older generation as they gather for their morning tea, giving us a glimpse of disappearing China.

Stone steles:
Those old people (Laohan in Chinese) recall the “Luohan”, the itinerant Arhat monks, known for their exemplary lives. The Arhats have in turn inspired the artist for the third part of his exhibition: 18 stone steles, carved in the most traditional Chinese way representing the "18 Arhats". Like stele forests in many Chinese cities (Xi’an, Kunming, Nanjing etc.), they have been carved by masters from portraits made by YANG HUI with ink on Chinese paper.
The steles will be installed on the Museum’s First Floor, and they can be stamped in the traditional way.

This exhibition represents the new wave of humanist thinking in the Chinese tradition. The series of the 18 Arhats depicts the junction between tradition and modernity, humanism and realism. The expressions seen in all the portraits of the “500 old Chinese people” give us a better understanding of the gap that must be straddled to reach the “harmonious” society imagined for the 21st century.

About the Artist:
Yang Hui, known as Bahai, was one of the few abstract painters recognized at the beginning of the 1980s in Beijing, where he received his diploma from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and in Shanghai where he used to be an art professor at the Shanghai University of Design before going to France in the early 90s. Since 1999 he has been taking photographs in old villages of Zhejiang province where he grew up. From this period onwards, he has begun to change his pictorial style from Abstract to Figurative.