Pei Yang

There’s not an awful lot known about Pei Yang. Not that he’s an elusive, shadowy figure like; say famed graffiti artist, Banksy, but more the underlying fact that he’s perhaps not quite as forthcoming as some of his contempories; instead preferring to hide his considerable artistic light under a bushel. What we do know however, comes from a variety of sources, most of which is common knowledge, whilst we’ve done a little detective work to attempt to dig a little deeper into the life and times of Pei Yang, acclaimed (but difficult to find that much information on, to be perfectly honest) contemporary still life and landscape fine artist. What we have managed to ascertain (courtesy of our friends over at LinkedIn) is that Yang is currently (when not creating superbly detailed, Impressionism-style compositions) charged with being Art Director for Mediacan Productions, who are based in the Montreal area of Canada, which we know for a fact is where Yang resides these days. And that he’s been in the employ of this company since 2007, and that when he’s not doing what he does, commercially on their behalf, he busies himself BG, Matte and Concept painting.

And prior to this he worked in the capacity of a Matte Painter for Meter Studios, where he was responsible for creating matte paintings for Discovery Channel TV,‘The Face of the Earth’. And before this, Yang was successfully employed as an Art department supervisor for Bardel Entertainment in Vancouver, where he (amongst other things) supervised the background department on animated TV show,‘Silverwing’ and created concept art and matte paintings for animated special, ‘Dragons-Fire & Ice (Megablocks)’. Elsewhere and Yang was also tasked with originating background art for Dreamworks’ Studio on, ‘Joseph-The king of Dream’, while also being heavily involved in the development of related art work for other projects. We could go on, but we need to get back to the bit that concerns us, now that we’ve fleshed out the barest of bones. Yang’s arty art.

Born in Yangzhou, China in 1971, Yang was first introduced to art at high school, which for many of us is our first formal insight into the creative discipline. Pretty much early doors and Yang was bagging various prizes and competitions for his artistic prowess, as well as seeing his fledgling art work exhibited within not just an educational environ, but more widespread; including exposure at galleries, government halls and international film festivals, all of which happened from 1989 onwards. Yang immigrated to Canada back in 1994, and chose to major in Fine Art at Ottawa School of Art and Animation, which was part of the Algonquin College in Ottawa, Ontario. In 1996 Yang held his debut solo exhibition, staged in Ottowa, while from 1999 to 2000 Yang was fortunate enough to work in the guise of an assistant with celebrated artist, Philip Craig at his studio.

Yang’s paintings are representing at Kastel Gallery in Montreal and also Montreal Museum of Fine Art Gallery, and as a visual development artist in film animation (which we touched on in the intro), he’s also worked on films from Columbia Studios and Dreamworks Studios, in both cases helping to engineer the visual look for the film. Yang is also one of the Emmy Award-winning artists from TV Series,‘Sagwa-The Chinese Siamese Cat’ which was first aired in 2002. Today, Pei lives in Montreal and continues his art career around his more commercial commitments.