Shiy De-Jinn (Xi Dejin)

Important Private Australian Collection

The World of Shiy De Jinn, The Heritage Press, Taipei, 1961, p. 5

This work is overall in good condition. Fine craquelure in the thickly painted areas. Pinpoint paint losses in the area where the vest is painted. Small accretions and stains at the lower left corner.
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Shiy De-Jinn Young Girl

'When I like someone at first glance, nine times out of ten, we will become friends. This is my first criterion of friendship. I love young, healthy, lively, good-looking people. From their faces, I can see their beautiful souls, kind hearts, and sincere feelings, and that’s perfection by itself.'

Shiy De-Jinn

Intuition, Instinct, and Innocence

Born in the early 1920s, Shiy De-Jinn grew up in a hilly area of Sichuan province. In his childhood years, he would buy mineral pigments of scarlet, navy blue, malachite green, and cadmium yellow at the general store. Filled with wonder, he mixed them in clamshells and concocted all varieties of new hues. That was how he fell in love with painting, and he later said that it was the diversity and variation in painting that excited him. In 1941, at the age of 18, Shiy was admitted to Sichuan Provincial School of Art and Technology, where he began his formal education in the arts. He studied sketching from Pang Xunqin, who had returned from his own studies in France and taught his students about the artwork of Picasso and Matisse. When Pang left the school, Shiy followed his mentor from Chengdu to Chongqing, where he audited classes from Pang at the National School of Arts. He formally became a student the following year after earning the top score out of 500 applicants who took the entrance examination. Now 21 years old, Shiy was inspired anew by his young teaching assistants, including Zao Wou-Ki and Chu Teh-Chun. He was particularly influenced by Lin Fengmian, who was his third- and fourth-year instructor. Shiy once said, 'He taught me how to use line to show body, and not to seek light and shadow on the canvas, because light and shadow are external. Instead, one must gasp the existence of the object, and strengthen that existence. He taught me to paint boldly, and pursue my own style.'

When the War of Resistance against Japan ended in 1947, Shiy moved with the National School of Arts to Hangzhou. The following year, he graduated with the top marks in his class. Seven years of fine arts education had given Shiy a solid foundation in painting technique, but the ultimate direction of his artistic journey remained undetermined. In 1948, he decided to follow the student volunteer army to Taiwan. A classmate from Hangzhou, Wu Xuerang, helped him get a job as an art instructor at National Chiayi Senior High School. Shiy later described the unadorned scenery of Southern Taiwan as “the most frank vindication of my life”. In this hot and strange land, Shiy’s work grew increasingly truthful and natural. He once said, 'allow your fundamental skills help your expression, but don’t allow them to limit you. When there are fresh subjects beside you or in front of your eyes, you must not allow them to escape. You must capture them'. Shiy threw off the fetters of the past and relied on his own instincts to form a new style. To this point, he describes his practice of painting as 'creation'. An air of freedom began to characterise his paintings. In his own words: 'I sought to determine what was constant in people. Painting also possesses certain common, constant elements: intuition, instinct, and innocence.'

In this turbulent era of Chinese history, Shiy De-Jinn’s paintings bore witness to the Western influence on Eastern art. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a trend toward complete Westernization arose in Taiwanese painting circles. Shiy De-Jinn was highly interested in abstract art, and in 1958, he published articles voicing support for modern art groups such as the Fifth Moon Group and the Tong Fang Painting Association. He also painted some of his own completely abstract works until 1963. He once said, 'From 1958 to 1962, I painted abstract paintings. It was a period of relative remove from local sentiment, but in terms of colour, I was still including some hints of local hues.' Shiy was in close contact with the Fifth Moon Group, and he appreciated the Eastern characteristics of their abstract paintings, which reflected the abstract aesthetic ideas of traditional Chinese culture that he had long identified with. All sorts of abstract backgrounds are evident in Shiy’s later portrait work. From the firm, frame-like background of Portrait of Writer Kuo Liang-Huei to the Abstract Expressionist style of the background in Young Girl, which brings to mind the work of Clyfford Still, abstract backgrounds were evidently a characteristic way for Shiy to create intense variety in his work while maintaining a fundamentally Eastern tone.

In 1952, Shiy resigned from his position at National Chiayi Senior High School and moved to Taipei. He struggled to support himself as a professional painter, and sometimes supplemented his income by designing stamps and contributing illustrations to periodicals. Over the course of the 1950s, he gradually earned some acclaim, participating in group shows hosted by the Taipei Cooperative Building (1952) and the Taipei News Building (1955). In 1957, his painting The Goose Seller, for which he had used an indigenous resident of Shezi as his model, was included in the 4th San Paulo Biennale, and the same year, Xian zuo, his bucolic portrayal of Taiwanese country folk, was elected for inclusion in the National Art Exhibition. Shiy’s mastery of painting soon earned him his first solo exhibition, which was hosted by the China Institute, and the Minzu Evening News included large prints of several of Shiy’s paintings in the paper’s fifth pictorial edition. Cumulatively, the 1950s marked the formation of Shiy De-Jinn’s painting style. In his book [essay?], Shiy De-Jinn on European and American Art, he states: “The evolution of painting is not only changes in concepts, ideas, and formal themes. The most important developments come in the realms of texture and methods of expression”. Shiy’s paintings of people feature uncommon backgrounds that use oil paints to express textures and depths reminiscent of ink painting. Indeed, it was Shiy’s mastery of texture and methods of expressions that allowed him to become one of the very few Chinese mid-century artists to combine portraiture with abstract art.

'Good portraits can penetrate the spirit, capture your personality, express your characteristics, and portray concealed expressions you weren’t aware of. An experienced portrait artist is like a physiognomist or a fortune-teller. He can use his brush to express your life experiences.'

Shiy De-JinnYoung Girl (Lot 1027), painted in 1960, features a short-haired girl of unknown identity sitting calmly on a simple chair. The composition of the painting strikes an uncanny sense of equilibrium through the posture of the girl, the chair, and the abstract grain of the background, exquisitely attaining the frozen-in-time aesthetic of effective portraiture. The textural characteristics of the painting are evident in its different aspects, from the girl’s clothing and skin to the abstract background, each of which was painted with a different technique. The subject of the painting is framed in wide and bold lines that pleasantly express her youth and simplicity. This portrayal reflects Shiy’s pursuit of gentle beauty and ease, which characterised his work ever since his time at the National School of Arts. In this way, Shiy De-Jinn’s portrait goes beyond the depiction of a person; it is densely atmospheric in a way that surpasses Chinese ink painting. While it reflects the artistic and societal context of the 1960s, the painting also exalts portraiture to a status that Chinese artists have rarely achieved.