Scarlett Reliquet Bonduelle : “ Yin Xin’s Portraiture : Posing for eternity. ”

“ After years of ironic and cynical depiction of an ominous human nature, Yin Xin has turned this year of 1997 to a more pleasant and civilised world in which people appear respectful and serious. Inspired by old black and white family portraits photographed during the pre-revolutionary era, the artist has decided to catch up with realism and classicism. Yet, his vision of man has not changed : a great solitude and gloominess emanate from the characters portrayed in his paintings. His characters are common people -a young bride, a husband and a wife, a teacher and pupil. Their bodies are stiff and usually enclosed in long, formal, twenties style European or Chinese dress. Their look is straight-forward, passionless or even totally inexpressive. The pose is sepia shade of old photographs, combine to give a strong impression of the past.

It is not that the artist particularly glorifies the precommunist period, when China had strong cultural and economic relationships with the west, but one feels a hint of nostalgia for an idealized world when people were knitted to each other by noble feelings such as mutual respect, fraternity, conjugal love. Has this epoch totally vanished in today’s capitalist China ? Is modernity necessarily a synonym of individualism ? Yin Xin’s answer is complex but one feels he does not particularly hold in reverence the harshness and eagerness which characterize human relationships and daily life in contemporary China. And so, he makes evident in the attitude of his characters the traditional educational principles taught to every young Chinese person : self-control and earnestness.

Nevertheless, the serious appearance and dignity of his subjects masks a certain fragility. The people Yin Xin depicts seem to have endured their share of hardships, be it before or after the feelings about the Cultural Revolution period. Altough he was privileged to work on wall murals in the Social Realist style, the style that was then taught, he remembers being seriously deprived of good western art reproduction and material while studying at the Xian Academy of Fine Arts. Since then, the situation has changed a great deal and the artist is enjoying the opportunity to travel, study and exhibit his work abroad.

Yin Xin is now a fellow resident of the Cité des Arts in Paris where he likes to wander in the capital’s museums, in particular the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay. There he admires the work of great masters he reveres : David, Goya, and Manet among others. He likes to peint copies of his favourite masterpieces not mere copies, of course, but “ creative copies ”, as he calls them. His recent interpretation of Manet’s “ Déjeuner sur l’herbe ” shows the usual characters : french bourgeois in black suits retsing in the countryside, but this time they are dressed in traditional Chinese costumes and wearing a long braid. The naked lady sitting in front and exposing her flesh to the male company is also there. ”