Tokyo Gallery + BTAP is pleased to present Salute to Masters, Jin Sha’s first solo exhibition in Japan with 15 works of Chinese painting, print, and sculpture.

Jin Sha was born in 1968 in Beijing, China. After graduating from the School of Chinese Painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he has mainly worked on Gongbi painting which is characterized by the meticulous depiction of details. Since 1998, he has been based in China and Australia, engaging in a wide range of activities including organizing exhibitions as a curator.

Since he was a student, Jin Sha has been strongly attracted to both classic Chinese art and the art of the Western Renaissance, and has continued to produce works under their dual influence. The Salute to Masters series that will be presented in this exhibition makes direct references to the masters of the Renaissance. Employing a unique method that combines the use of perspective and chiaroscuro that originated in the West, with the traditional painting techniques of Gongbi painting, the artist evokes ideological problems that are peculiar to the contemporary times.

Jin Sha has chosen to reproduce portraits, but he eliminates the person from the paintings in doing so. Clothes and accessories hang in midair, and a painstakingly depicted landscape extends beyond the disquieting void left by the vanished human figure. Allegorical objects, such as apples and pipes, are placed in the air where the person used to be as if to pose a riddle to the viewer.

By eliminating the human figure from works of art from the Renaissance, regarded as a period in which mankind was restored, Jin Sha quietly but pointedly questions the very conditions of modern civilization. Perhaps the artist also sees contemporary China reflected in the Renaissance in which economic activities progressed and culture reached a state of maturity, but which was also burdened with ethical degeneration that juxtaposed the material affluence.