Scarlet Cheng , Art Critic, New York, 1998, Yin Xin : The past feeds the present

“ As Chinese artists of the Post-Cultural Revolution generation begin to make waves in galleries and exhibitions from Honk Kong to New York, from Sao Paolo to Venice, they are trying to establish their place on the international art scene. One who continues to march to a different drummer, his own, is Yin Xin who left China in 1988 and studied in Australia before finally settling in Paris, where he still lives and works.

In the past Yin Xin’s expertise was in wood block prints, in delineating the fears and desires of humans beings in a hard-edged graphic style as they passed through the world from childhood to adulthood. Then he discovered Western masters - including Manet, De La Tour, Picasso - in his own, neo-Brutalist style. In recent years, his tone has softened, and now he is immersed in reexploring the turn-of-the-century past of his homeland.

He is fascinated by this period - the end of the Qing dynasty and the early days of the Chinese Republic - because, he says “ It’s such an interesting period, when Chinese and Western society got mixed together. China was in transition, and it was a time of culture shock. In a series of skirmishes and wars, the West had pushed open China’s door with a bang, and progress could no onger be stilled. This series of paintings, done in sepia tones and on highly textured surfaces that give a sense of age and distance, reflects the quiet collision of East and West. In “ Intellectuals ”, for exemple, a group of chinese men hover around the central character, a westerner in beard, suit and tie. The Chinese men dress in styles which reflect four different attitudes or states of being. The balding man on the upper left wears a conservative, Chinese-style button-up gown, but he has recently cut off his pigtail, that hated imposition on the Han race by the Manchu rulers, whose reign collapsed in 1911. For Yin Xin, “ he wants to change but he wants to stay the same. ”

Meanwhile, the man standing at right has trimmed his hair in a short Western style. From his Sun Yatsen suit and his steady gaze towards us, he appears to be a university student and a progressive one at that, who will one day be agitating for democracy and human rights. The two older Chinese gentlemen are clearly conservatives. At lower left sits a banker or businessman rich on new enterprises, he wears a formal Western suit and looks ready to attend a fancy dinner or dress ball. To the far right sits a wealthy Chinese mandarin in a skullcap and traditional suit of silk brocade, a man still firmly lodged in the past.

“ I’m not so interested in contemporary China, ” says Yin Xin. “ I’m more interested in these people of the past, their clothing, their look, their sensibility. ” He admits that there is a strong element of nostalgia in his work. “ I’m not saying everything in the past is good, but we should look back and take back some to the values that were good. ”