A Chinese artist’s paintings of inmates living inside one of Rome’s most well-known prisons will be projected on the prison building’s exterior and displayed in a new exhibit space near the Vatican as part of 2025 Jubilee initiatives.
The 64-year-old Yan Pei-Ming is a Chinese contemporary artist who has been living in Dijon, France since 1981. He is known for his “epic-sized” portraits of figures such as Chairman Mao, St. Pope John Paul II, Bruce Lee, and Barack Obama.
Pei-Ming’s latest portrait series, 27 prisoners living inside Regina Coeli Prison, will be displayed on the side of the prison building. The works, created at the request of the Vatican’s education and culture dicastery, will be the inaugural exhibit of a new art space on Via della Conciliazione, the main street leading to St. Peter’s Basilica.
The Vatican will highlight the work of contemporary artists during the 2025 Jubilee Year and beyond with the new exhibit space, called “Conciliazione 5,” to be inaugurated Feb. 15, during the Jubilee of Artists and the World of Culture.
The Vatican has planned a slew of events for the Feb. 15-18 Jubilee of Artists, including the opening of the contemporary art space, Sunday Mass with Pope Francis, and the first-ever visit by a pope to the film studios of Cinecittà.
The Vatican expects more than 10,000 people from across the wider art and cultural environments — hailing from over 100 countries and five continents — to participate in events over the four days.
The curator of the Yan Pei-Ming exhibit at “Conciliazione 5,” Cristiana Perrella, told journalists on Wednesday that Pei-Ming created the 27 inmate portraits in a matter of 20 days late last year in a studio in Shanghai. Due to time constraints, the painter worked from photos and also asked for information about the prisoners’ lives.
The portraits, Perrella said, help us to remember that inmates “are not the crime they have committed, that people’s meanings are not in this — they are paying for a crime they have done — but ... the people who live in the prison are alive, they have thoughts and dreams. And Pei-Ming’s work helps us to remember all that, to look at the prison community with a different perspective. And that precisely is the strength of art, the strength of this project.”
“The theme of hope, strongly felt by Pope Francis, intersects humanity in places of hardship,” Lina Di Domenico, the head of the prison administration department of Italy’s Ministry of Justice, said on Feb. 12.
Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça said at a Feb. 12 press conference the purpose of the Jubilee Year initiatives is to cultivate a dialogue on hope: “To question how contemporary art can convey hope by reaching out to sensitive human places. To search together for spiritual and artistic expressions that can serve as grammars and poetries of hope for the contemporary time.”
Originally the site of a 17th-century convent, from which it gets its name, the Regina Coeli Prison was constructed in 1881 by the Italian government after the country's unification. A women’s prison called the Mantellate was later built nearby, also on the site of a former convent.