I've never looked at Jin's micro-paintings or micro-carvings in person, and even if I had, I wouldn't have been able to see them -- not without a microscope. Even his biggest micro-painting, a group of portraits of the 42 US presidents on a single human hair, is less than 6mm long.
The Portraits of 42 American Presidents was completed last year in New York and holds the world record for most portraits in the smallest area. Somehow, Jin managed to give each president a vivid expression in a face with a diameter less than 0.4mm. Each face is distinct and recognizable.
Jin has created over 100 micro-paintings and carvings on different-colored hair, ivory and diamonds, and his works extend the traditional Chinese art of engraving and miniscule calligraphy.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF ARTIST:
In an e-mail interview, Jin explained that micro-painting has a long history in China and was done in pictographs on animal bones and tortoise shells. Jin called these Shang Dynasty inscriptions "the earliest mature writing" in China.
This writing, Jin said, was meant to evoke or explain the divine. As most people were illiterate, writing was of little help to the majority. In fact, it was the mystery of the inaccessible language that evoked the divine.
Today, micro-art creates hidden worlds similar to how carved pictographs created hidden worlds to populations of illiterates.
Jin has carved Tang Dynasty poems onto human hair, and his 1986 work Li Bai includes a Li Bai poem, beside a portrait of the poet in a white cloak under the moon -- all in a 3mm by 5.5mm area. Pine Trees in a Cloudy Valley (1985, 2x7.5mm), The Great Wall (1988, 3.5x6mm) and Flying Cloud (1986, 3x5.5mm) extend the Chinese landscape tradition, while Red Plum (1986, 3x6mm) is comparatively sparse and manages to contrast bright red petals on an ivory background through carving and painting.
Jin has extended traditional techniques of micro-carving and painting, too. He perfected a method called pomo in which minute amounts of ink are splashed onto the surface of ivory, usually about the size of a rice grain. Jin also uses more traditional tools, such as little brushes, inks and oils to paint.
Micro-painting is usually the medium he uses for his pop culture and Western-themed works, and he has also created micro-paintings of Asian and Middle Eastern heads of state. Elegant is a portrait on the width of a black hair and resembles Marilyn Monroe. Charlie Chaplain is about the same size and is painted on a white hair.
In the US and Europe, it's micro-painting, not micro-carving, that has found interest and applicability beyond pop culture icon renditions and pictures of president.
Micro-painting caught some attention during the West's modernist period, when American and European artists began to think of Asian art as something that could be applied to Western practice, not simply as something to gaze at with Orientalist thinking. Max Ernst's Micro-painting, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is an example.
Micro-painting has also been practically applied in the area of making toys, trinkets, jewelry, models and game-pieces in the West, but China has been the hub of producing the items that are micro-painted and sent to the shelves of Western stores.
At the European company that produces Kinder Surprises -- tiny figures inside Easter eggs -- robots have taken over the painting of 23 million tiny figures, whose faces and details used to be painted by Chinese laborers. The robots are faster and paint with an accuracy within .01mm.
Micro-painting and micro-carving are still alive, well and centered in China, despite robotic competition. Jin separates his time between China and New York.
The world record for most characters in a micro-carving is held by Chinese artist?Xu Tonghai for, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, which includes 10,720,000 characters.
Feb. 17 to Feb. 23 “Japanese city is bombed,” screamed the banner in bold capital letters spanning the front page of the US daily New Castle News on Feb. 24, 1938. This was big news across the globe, as Japan had not been bombarded since Western forces attacked Shimonoseki in 1864. “Numerous Japanese citizens were killed and injured today when eight Chinese planes bombed Taihoku, capital of Formosa, and other nearby cities in the first Chinese air raid anywhere in the Japanese empire,” the subhead clarified. The target was the Matsuyama Airfield (today’s Songshan Airport in Taipei), which
For decades, Taiwan Railway trains were built and serviced at the Taipei Railway Workshop, originally built on a flat piece of land far from the city center. As the city grew up around it, however, space became limited, flooding became more commonplace and the noise and air pollution from the workshop started to affect more and more people. Between 2011 and 2013, the workshop was moved to Taoyuan and the Taipei location was retired. Work on preserving this cultural asset began immediately and we now have a unique opportunity to see the birth of a museum. The Preparatory Office of National
China has begun recruiting for a planetary defense force after risk assessments determined that an asteroid could conceivably hit Earth in 2032. Job ads posted online by China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) this week, sought young loyal graduates focused on aerospace engineering, international cooperation and asteroid detection. The recruitment drive comes amid increasing focus on an asteroid with a low — but growing — likelihood of hitting earth in seven years. The 2024 YR4 asteroid is at the top of the European and US space agencies’ risk lists, and last week analysts increased their probability
On Jan. 17, Beijing announced that it would allow residents of Shanghai and Fujian Province to visit Taiwan. The two sides are still working out the details. President William Lai (賴清德) has been promoting cross-strait tourism, perhaps to soften the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) attitudes, perhaps as a sop to international and local opinion leaders. Likely the latter, since many observers understand that the twin drivers of cross-strait tourism — the belief that Chinese tourists will bring money into Taiwan, and the belief that tourism will create better relations — are both false. CHINESE TOURISM PIPE DREAM Back in July
RSS