Jin Yangping

Jin Yanping has a PhD. from The China Academy of Art in oil painting. He now teaches in the Fourth Studio of Oil Painting Department in the China Academy of Art.

"With his virtuoso use of alternating thin layers and thick impasto and a ingenious play of fore and background Jin manages to construct a complex image that requires an intensive and repeating investigation. In some of his paintings he combines painting with photographic material to stress that the imagery is partly distracted from photographic of digital media. The sheer joy of painting reveals itself as well in the decorative motifs that are regularly introduced. Particuliarly in the landscape paintings or the series that he called Forest of Olfaction Jin demonstrates that a modern painter is not required to a strict following of a motive, but that the structuring of colors, brushstrokes and layers can be independent of an image and can ultimately lead to more abstract compositions. By using a more experimental and less predicteble way of painting he explores the limits of realistic painting where the motive still seems to dominate over the formal elements of painting itself. In this way Jin is as well continuing a tradition that is developed and set by great Chinese masters, but also by a western tradition of painters like Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso and Baselitz." - Maarten Bertheux