At the dawn of a Chinese New Year placed under the elegant sign of the rabbit, galerie Orbis pictus invites you to reimagine classic Western painting through the eyes, palette and brushes of contemporary Chinese artist Yin Xin.

His interpretation, his transformations, his very personal metamorphoses of traditional painting allow us to put into perspective two great artistic and cultural civilisations which nourish each other through the fertile imagination of the artist.

Yin Xin, a child of the Gobi Desert on the borders of Afghanistan, summons and reinterprets some of the major works of Western painting by Vinci, Holbein, La Tour, Velazquez, Watteau, Manet, Whistler, Kramskoi, Sargent, Magritte …, to enrich his imaginary museum of the Celestial Empire. From the Silk Road to the opulent Parisian avenues, from Mao's Cultural Revolution to the Louvre Museum, Yin Xin learned painting the traditionally way, by copying the old Masters, learning all the secrets of painting from scratch in order to then develop his own style. There is no desire for revenge here from a conquering China that would reclaim Western traditions. Yin Xin paints from Paris, where he settled down in 1994, his own vision of China, a China from within.
So why this East-West marriage that some would call heterogeneous? Going beyond the codes specific to religions and cultures, Yin Xin invites us to discover what is hidden behind the canvas, to capture the soul of the artist, his intentions beyond the image. A careful observation of the combination of Eastern and Western elements enables the viewer to sharpen his perception of the artistic value of the work in his own cultural context. With tenderness and not without some irony, he offers a new reading of iconic works from the past, shamelessly and enriched with universalism.
So welcome to this museum reinvented and additionally filled with nostalgic and romantic compositions of an elitist colonial China which had adopted the codes of the West, these paintings which, just as much as the Afters… are executed in the manner of the old masters with particularly acute care given to the treatment of light that has become substance.

And After? You be the judge.

And after?

Yin Xin