Mu PAN

Mu Pan was born in Taiwan in 1976 to a family originally from mainland China. He left the is- land and its complex history for New York where he emigrated with his parents in 1997 when he was 21. Starting from scratch with his family, he embraced American culture with some tre- pidation, and studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York where he graduated in 2007 with an M.F.A. with honors. Now an American citizen, Mu Pan cultivates and asserts his multi- ple cultural identities in his paintings. He paints with acrylic on wood and paper.

Mu Pan is like the encounter of Hieronymus Bosch with Kuniyoshi and Marvel Comics. His large epic and narrative paintings are steeped in cultural and historical references to Japan and China, and American pop culture. The nar- ratives he develops feature events from clas- sical and contemporary Chinese and Japanese history, reinterpreted in his committed and political pictorial language. His new myths are marked by hybrid characters and elements of popular culture bordering on the cartoonish. His narrative paintings are also the pretext for acerbic social criticism of his host and native countries, on immigration, the gentrification of working-class neighborhoods in New York or

the new generation of young people in Taiwan. His more recent work allows him to develop a new form of narrative, and the creation of a pantheon of animal gods.

The atmosphere of chaos and swarming that emanates from most of his works is reminiscent of Dutch or Indian miniatures, for its end-of- the-world atmosphere, for its hybrid half-man half-animal characters, for the abundance of details and the mystical and mythical character that emerges. This apparent violence is related to his personality: Mu Pan says of himself that he is an angry person, so his artistic work is for him a way to equity: «Drawing and painting are, for me, the most obvious ways to find justice».

Abrams published the first monograph book de- dicated to the work and practice of Mu Pan in 2020 (American Fried Rice: The Art of Mu Pan).