It is hard to define 82-year-old artist and scholar Jin Zhilin, a professor with the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

However, his ongoing solo exhibition at the National Art Museum of China and a newly published book The Jin Zhilin Phenomenon provides an insight into the range of his academic achievements, and the scope and depth of his work over the past six decades.

The exhibition, which runs until May 25, presents over 200 of his landscapes and portraits, some 100 sketches and a selection of documents, books and photographs revealing Jin's unremitting efforts to create his own artistic style and to preserve the largely ignored intangible cultural heritage of the western provinces.

In the 1950s, Jin, the son of a peasant family in Hebei province, was trained both in ink painting, sculpture and oil paintings under the guidance of such masters as Xu Beihong, Wu Zuoren and Dong Xiwen in Beijing.

Jin's early oil works and sketches offer viewers a realistic picture of socialist endeavors in the 1950s and early 1960s. Many of these works depict workers in factories and peasants in the fields.

In the late 1960s Jin turned to folk art, working first in Jilin in Northeast China, and later in Yan'an, Shaanxi province.

"Apart from my education at the art academy, my source of nourishment comes mainly from folk art, from folk artists. A lot of them are women in rural areas. I have learned so much about traditional Chinese arts and culture, which I hold as the root of our Chinese civilization," Jin says.

His love for traditional arts and culture and Chinese philosophy has resulted in a host of books on Chinese folk art, and ethnology that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages since the 1990s.

While engaging himself in preserving and studying local arts and culture, Jin also forged his own style of oil painting that combines his early discipline and aesthetic concepts in calligraphy and ink painting with oils.

Instead of painting with the brushes usually used for oils, he produces his emotional and brightly colored works with lang hao, a specially made, very resilient writing brush made of weasel's hair.

"Only in so doing have I found a unique way to express my feeling," Jin says.

He also insists on doing his sketches and his oil landscapes outdoors, employing natural light.

"Working outdoors, I feel at ease and enchanted by the lively landscapes and the people," he explains.

Earlier this month Jiangsu Phoenix Publishing launched the 800-page book The Jin Zhilin Phenomenon with essays from scholars, that offers readers a comprehensive reading of Jin's artistic and academic merit.

Among his well-known oil works are Nanniwan, a panoramic work that depicts the Eighth Route Army soldiers in Yan'an during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1938-45). Beijing Hanhai Auctions sold the painting last autumn for over 13 million yuan ($1.9 million).

Although the exhibition is described as a retrospective of his life and work, at the opening on Monday Jin said: "I am still young and full of energy. I am still learning. I hope to stage my real, retrospective show 10 years from now, which would be better."

China Daily

(China Daily 05/22/2010 page11)