Few in the West may be aware that Europeans presided as painters in ancient China. Such history is not forgotten by contemporary artist Jin Sha nor to broader China, where famously it is known that in the early 1700s – at the end of European Renaissance and the dawn of the Enlightenment – Giuseppe Castiglione of Milan was appointed for four decades as the official Jesuit court painter to three Qing Dynasty emperors. Castiglione conversed and learned from his contemporary Chinese masters and experimented combining Western colours with Chinese ink, painting and documenting the Orient’s extraordinary people and pageantry through Catholic eyes. From an art history perspective, well over 300 years ago these Europeans were thus mastering the practice of infusing classical Italian Renaissance techniques with the orthodox Chinese discipline of Gongbi; and their experimentation in applying Western aesthetic philosophy onto Eastern paper and silk made painters such as Castiglione one of the foremost international contemporary artist of his time.
Come the 21st Century, Jin Sha now reconsiders this history and reverses the Gongbi style back onto contemporary art with his Salute to Masters series, a surreal provocation and re-combination of Western and Sino-Confucian art history with Eastern philosophical thought. Mindful of Chinese tradition but also to historical Western innovators like Castiglione, Jin Sha collide worldviews to ponder the role of the individual as well as reveal paradoxes embedded in identity, power and temptation. His purpose is to produce works which “unite the recognisable with the unfamiliar so to form dialogue and discussion” on Chinese and world art. His method is a technical exploration of canonical Western art through Gongbi.
In the Conversations with the Italian Renaissance, ghosts of female figures are covered and clothed; most have their hair veiled and covered: what can be more Western than a portraiture? Relative to the East, Western philosophy places the individual at the universe’s centre, however upon the patronage by either church or aristocrat history’s masters often attain immortality by painting the flesh of a woman with supreme femininity. Absent in Jin Sha’s works thus are the female flesh. In Conversations with Pisanello by the wayside of a pious female ghost an apple of desire entices butterflies awaiting to pollinate open blossoms, while Conversations with Piero del Pollaiuolo hint at the fair suppleness of an elongated ghostly female neck decorated with pearls and gems. Conceptually, these works are foremost about human nature and therefore about both woman and man. Temptation for the flesh are suspended with god’s lures and exquisite invocations to sex are surreptitiously transformed into a Surreal power-play to Rene Magritte’s idea of identity and desire; as the saying goes: “everything in the world is about sex except sex itself. Sex itself is about power”. Jin Sha thus speaks to Eastern philosophy of the diminished role of individual identity; and Western representation of the female flesh as a coveted object for draping affluence and power. Similarly, in Conversations with Sandro Botticelli the depiction of the Annunciation by Gabriel to Mary is reimagined as a Surreal scene of transaction and temptation. The ghost of Virgin Mary – impregnated by the Holy Ghost – extends her sleeve towards the apple of desire while a pouch of gold marks the transaction. Gabriel’s welding the purity of white lilies is absurd as the vanitas of war and ruin.
The human form – often with a sexualised undertone – has the strongest gravity in Western classical art; while the sacrifice of individuality to a greater good is a general hall mark of Eastern tradition. Jin Sha unites the familiar and unfamiliar in this exhibition to form a dialogue on the ghosts of Western and Eastern thoughts; sex, power and all. Jin Sha is a leading authority of the Gongbi style. He trained at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and his works are held in China and Australia, including at the National Art Gallery of China in Beijing.
About Gongbi
Gongbi (loosely translated as “the discipline of the brush”) is considered the most precise and realist style of classical Chinese painting. It emphasises the exquisiteness of discipline and detail in executing Chinese ink-brushes; and when applied to paper or silk leaves the artist no room for error or revision. A typical work takes Jin Sha’s minimum of months to complete.
