Capturing the Inner Essence: Chinese and Japanese Portraiture

The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria will host an exhibition of Chinese and Japanese Portraiture from September 14, 2012 to January 20, 2013.

Chinese and Japanese portrait artists tried to present an image with an inner poetic reality rather than an outward likeness. Their technical approach to portraiture was simplicity, which was in sharp contrast to the photo-likeness of some Western paintings with their problems of volume, light shadow and texture.

Chinese and Japanese portrait artists did not sit with their canvas in front of their subject, but would study them and then they would return to the stillness of their studios and work from memory attempting to invest their recollection with the profundity of their thoughts. They loved to portrait older people to show the effect of aging and display a strange kind of inner beauty. The exhibition will include paintings and prints mainly from the 19^th and 20^th centuries.