Yin Xin: Venus, After Botticelli 2008
Art is an intrinsic, collective language of humanity. No matter where you are born, in Renaissance Italy like Botticelli, or in the Gobi desert under communist China like Yin Xin, you will understand what a painting shows you, what a sculpture whispers to you. Not all the works of art, of course, will talk to you, but you will find the ones that will. Or rather, the artworks will find you.
Yin Xin started to copy European masters’ artworks to learn how to be a master as well. It is as if he were asking their help and blessing. Today, he lives far from the Gobi desert, but close to the Louvre, in Paris. He is a recognized, successful artist. But Yin Xin never forgot the old masters who taught him to paint. He made an “After Old Masters” series of paintings. Yin Xin recreated lots of famous paintings and he always added his own cultural, social heritance – China – into them.
Yin Xin’s Venus has a rippling black hair and musing Asian-shaped eyes. She bends her head gracefully to the sideway as a proper Venus ought to.
Chinese Mona Lisa sits in front of solemn gray cliffs, definitely not Toscana. Her mind is somewhere else. Her smile, which reaches only her lips’ corners, is barely visible, but rather felt. Or it is just me who imagines the smile there. Her fine hands rest quite the same way as the original’s.
Madame Recamier is now a young Chinese girl in a red traditional dress, on an oriental sofa with Chinese signs on a red wall. Tiziano’s reclining Venus is as pale as her pillow. She has no jewelries or chubby puttos whispering in her ears. The background is not a well-groomed garden but a pagoda-style house. However, these are only details.
While Venus can have thousands of faces, she remains the same beauty.
Comments (1)
Love this