LLEI D'ART 11

HE JIAYING’s Contemporary Eastern Poetry For artists, solitude is the greatest source of riches He Jiaying The work of He Jiaying is framed by a context in which Chinese art was in the midst of a kind of national nihilism and was strongly influenced by certain modern Western art trends. Jiaying has looked into the history of his culture to extract the essence of beauty and adapt it to the classically-tinged pictorial trends that remain current in China. This skilful fusion of Eastern and Western spirits can be seen in his detailed works, like pictorial filigree, constructed using traditional techniques such as calligraphy, specifically the Gongbi technique (literally: meticulous, delicate, using very fine brushes), resulting in work with a profound aesthetic and poetic meaning. His interpretation of beauty is charged with symbolism and delicacy, optimism and hope. His nudes display such perfection and harmony in their proportions that they seem worthy of worship, beautifying reality with subtle touches of an Eastern aesthetic. He Jiaying’s painting combines lines and shades in a new focus that refreshes legendary Eastern trends by incorporating Western tones in a particular and elegant way of recreating Chinese realist painting, full of lyricism and poetry, but unequivocally modernized. He Jiaying (Tianjin, China, 1957) He is a respected artist devoted to his artistic dream; a thirty-year dream marked by poetry. Residing in China, he does not follow any particular trend, instead preferring to avoid them. He graduated from the Tianjin Institute of Fine Art in 1980, and subsequently worked there as a professor of painting. Currently He Jiaying is involved in various posts within the world of artistic and teaching investigation (Vice-President of the Association of Chinese Artist and of the Gongbi Chinese Painting Association, Vice-President of the Tianjin Artists’ Association, President of the Tianjin Academy of Artistic Studies, Researcher and doctoral thesis supervisor at the Chinese Artistic Research Institute, Professor of the Tianjin Fine Art Institute and Rector of the Tianjin Painting Institute). Throughout his long artistic career he has won many prizes for his exceptional contribution to Chinese painting and as a true artist, as well as the prize awarded by the Chinese Cultural Federation, who recognized his career with the award for Best Young Artist. His recent exhibition Feet on the Ground and Soul in the Sky , which closed on the 29 th December in Barcelona, was the first time the artist had displayed his work in Spain thanks to a collaboration between the Beijing Great Hero Cultural Company, the Samaranch Foundation and the European Museum of Modern Art. He Jiaying. Otoño/ Fall . Papel de arroz/ Rice paper, 2006.