When asked which artists he most admires, Yan Pei Ming does not look to China but to the West. He admires Picasso and DeKooning above all. But he wanted to develop his own style, his away way of painting…. While Chinese artists were forming groups in the 1980s, and artistic movements, Yan Pei Ming was working in a more individualistic way, creating his own style and technique. Most of his early works are still in France, stored in a warehouse. Mostly, he painted heads; backgrounds were not that important. And so, to this day, he still mostly paints this way. “I wanted to avoid painting like them (Picasso and DeKooning), so in the ‘80s, I started painting in black and white.” D. Barboza, ‘Master of the Big Brushstrokes: Yan Pei Ming’ in Artzinechina.Com, 2007