In “The Immortal Life”, a new collection of contemporary Chinese inks by Shan Sa, ancient Chinese thought is brought into the avant-garde. Taking Taoist ideas of the celestial realm as her muse, the artist creates compositions that are at once bold and subtle, imaginative and realistic, beautiful and profound. With flashing brushstrokes and sweeping washes, “The Immortal Life” compositions form glimpses of the beauty and hedonism of the immortal world and highlight the transience of our own mortal paths. A rebel to her formal “literati” education, Shan Sa has continually pushed the boundaries of her traditional creative disciplines, to find new forms of expression that have gained widespread acclaim on an international stage.

Man’s aspirations to divinity are cross-cultural and ever present. In ancient China, people believed in the existence of immortal beings, who lived on floating islands, neither below nor above the sea, between the mountain peaks and the sky. The Taoist philosopher, Zhuang zi, recommended that that we should strive to emulate these immortals in order to achieve serenity and longevity. Thus many people devoted their lives to their quest to experience the joys of eternity through meditation, contemplation, asceticism and alchemy. Exploring these themes, Shan Sa creates a depth and serenity of colour that captures the imagination and gives pause for contemplation, while the placement of strong and vivid compositions on clean, ascetic scrolls symbolises the tension between tradition and modernity. The alchemical creation of vibrant pigments from a humble mixture of water and mineral compounds is a metamorphosis central to these works. With flashing brushstrokes and sweeping washes, “The Immortal Life” compositions form glimpses of the beauty and hedonism of the immortal world and highlight the transience of our own mortal paths.

About the Artist:

Shan Sa was born Yan Ni to a family of scholars in Beijing. She later adopted the name Shan Sa, taken from a poem by the Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi. Shan Sa is a prolific painter, and began taking lessons in traditional Chinese watercolor as early as eight years old. She studied art under the instruction of her grandmother, a master of Chinese calligraphy and ink. At the same age, she obtained the first prize in the National Poetry Contest for children under 12 years, an event that created a sensation in China. Before the age of 16, she had already published four collections of her poems in Chinese.

Shan Sa moved to Paris as a teenager in 1990, where she has continued to reside, having immediately fallen in love with the city. It was in France that she studied Philosophy and Art History at the Louvre and worked under the famous artist Balthus. Starting in 2005, Marlborough Gallery was the first to show her work for public exhibition, where she joined the ranks of other such renowned artists as Zao Wu Ki as one of the most talented modern Chinese artists out there today.

Shan Sa has become what was once known in China as a “literati”. She has mastered the four traditional disciplines: poetry, calligraphy, painting and music. She is now a celebrated painter with past exhibitions in New York, Paris, and Tokyo, among other cities.

As of today, Shan Sa’s literary works have been translated into over thirty foreign languages. She has published thirteen novels, two of which have won the Prix Goncourt in France. “The Immortal Life” is her fourth exhibition with the Elisabeth de Brabant Art Center in Shanghai.