THE METAMORPHOSIS OF A CHINESE MAN IN PARIS  

I discovered the superbly titled “The Chinese in Paris”, the work of a Chinese artist, in spring 2003. An expert on Courbet, I was greatly surprised to learn that l'Origine du Monde was not unknown to him, as it featured in his painting: the scene is of a group of Chinese mandarins in severe, frozen poses, standing to either side of a red background on which hangs a painting they are pretending to ignore, and which is none other than l'Origine du Monde , painted by Courbet in 1866, greatly shocking his contemporaries, who described it as “a life-size, frontal view of a woman, extraordinarily overcome and convulsed, …” because they did not dare write that the model was a naked women, lying with her body facing the viewer, legs apart … It is a disturbing painting, which today hangs in the Musée d'Orsay at the request of Sylvia Bataille, wife of the surrealist poet and later of the famous psychiatrist Lacan.

Seeking out this astonishing painter, I discovered Yin Xin, well established in Parisian circles, a fine-looking man, almost worldly, shy but assured. I prompted him: Why this contrasting association between East and West? He explained that in his painting, he tried to confront the permanence of the Middle Empire with a strong image that summed up Western civilisation. But why Courbet's l'Origine du Monde ? Yin Xin told me that the work he initially depicted hanging on the wall to symbolise the Western aesthetic for this assembly of Chinese notables was, of course, the Mona Lisa. But no, it was not lively enough, and not at all provocative! So he scrubbed out the Mona Lisa and revealed his fantasies …

Yin Xin arrived ten years ago and is now a Parisian. If China is his country, France is his territory, his birthplace as a painter. His own style of new Romanticism is free to take shape here. He needs this, for he has come a long way. Born in 1959 in Kashgar in Chinese Turkistan, among one of the distant peoples known as the Minorities in Peking, he was buffeted by Mao's Cultural Revolution and his family were forced into political exile in Mongolia. Everywhere in the world, the Minorities tend to constantly question received wisdom: life is difficult to bear when there is only one line of thinking.

I discovered this astonishing world while travelling across China, from Peking to Hong Kong, in 1978, meeting the warm, unequivocal, shy people who were forced to live the common way: morning exercises, cycling to dream, and the canteen to live, and who had just one object of praise: Mao and his little Red Book. At the time, the young Yin Xin was studying in Xian, in the region where the archaeological remains of dazzling ancient civilisations had been found: thousands of statuettes discovered in battle order in the imperial tombs, and clay horses buried centuries ago that were revealed along the road leading to the tombs. For the young painter determined to form an impression of the whole world, they evoked the richness of past civilisations, but also kindled his curiosity to discover the world of today elsewhere.

Well before the discovery of Courbet's allegory, the genitals of Jo Heffernan, the mistress he stole from Whistler, it was Australia and Melbourne that opened up the world to Yin Xin and gave him access to a different, cosmopolitan society. Several years later, after having travelled between China and Europe, Paris, the source of creative emotion, opened up to him. So now he is the most Parisian Chinese man, accessible to everyone through the experience of the life of the eternal immigrant. As he puts it succinctly, he has too many religions in his genes – Islam, Buddhism, Christianity – not to question everything … All that, he swept away, and what he is today, and what he wants to remain, is just a painter: free from everything, independent of all artistic trends.

Such a commitment has many consequences. And Yin Xin cultivates image changes: he refuses to be pigeonholed and escapes whenever he feels he is being pinned down. After having captured, with his brushes, the spectacle of life, and lived a hundred creative destinies, he has just changed again, embarking on a new adventure, which he has called Metamorphosis. Since coming to live in Paris, while still admiring Georges de Latour, he has become infatuated with a past evoked by the dusty old paintings lying around in the corners of bric-a-brac shops: everyday life in France in the mid-nineteenth century. To Courbet, the man of l'Origine du Monde , who proclaimed “I have a country, me, I paint it”, he responds that he has a country too, which he paints, but which he associates with others. These others are unknowns, modest painters, who supply flea market stalls with more or less decrepit works that reflect a glorious past. He likes them as he finds them. If he chooses them, he enters into osmosis with the artist from the past, whom he saves from abandonment and scorn. He takes over the person painted, gives them a history, and virtually becomes the painter, extending the original image in his own way. He adds to them too, to revive talent and reveal it to others. In the past year, he has acquired some sixty old canvases, which he enjoys altering with the feeling of being in harmony with the anonymous artists whose worlds he reconstructs. He honours painters of the past, taking over their subject matter: “You painted it before, I finish it”. As an alchemist, he takes the painting on a journey through time and space, bringing it back to life. He gives this life a Chinese twist, with a loving and sometimes caustic humour, using the subjects' clothing and poses to transform them. Everyone gets a new destiny: the nun from Tours becomes a woman from Beijing, the unappealing bourgeois woman becomes lively and crafty; Mr de St Laurent, a minor nobleman, becomes the rich director of the Shanghai trading post; the female Penitent, copied from Henner, is turned into a hussy; the old man with his Legion d'Honneur just changes continent, and the young praying man exchanges his crucifix for the little Red Book. Each one is a tender parody and forms part of a contemporary oeuvre, with Yin Xin its great architect.

Metamorphosis, the new genre he has invented, is of its time because it offers a new way of reading the past, it enriches universalism, it sets out a method of unashamed questioning, one that has immense respect, and that creates a continuum of life.

Yin Xin loves to be a magician. Is it Art or Parody? Is it enriching or subversive? In an era of clones, are we in the presence of a first metamorphosis and might we imagine, symmetrically, a Parisian in the next century in a flea market in Shanghai or Nanking, finding a painting that has already been metamorphosed and giving it a new prolongation of life? Are we seeing a new art form being born, with Yin Xin its prophet, creating dreams out of nothing and bringing destiny to a lost work? Through this role play, a painting by someone else becomes, through the scenography he imposes, his own creation. This is an artist who, reviving the enthusiasm of the Surrealist era, plays freely with our taboos and invents his Metamorphosis, a moment of original, new creativity, a moment of harmony, by reinventing characters from nineteenth-century France, subjecting them to amazing chinoiseries played out with a mixture of formidable pleasure and true talent.

Jean-Jacques Fernier

Curator of the Musée Courbet