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An artist with a keen regard for physical beauty and pleasure, Chong-qing painter Hui Xin seeks to establish a new kind of aesthetic with his art...

He makes use of the graceful images from classical paintings, and the bright colours of folk art and combines them in a decorative ethos that harmonizes their originally conflicting aspects.

Born in 1977, Hui Xin is known for his aesthetic appreciation of colour, and who is not particularly concerned with modernism or the contemporary aspects of his art. He derives great pleasure from the pure aesthetics

Spiritually, Hui Xin's paintings come closest to the realism of early photography. He combines his wealth of “folk knowledge” with his sensitivity to the details of secular life that see him take traditional Chinese motifs and transforming them into kitschy, gaudy, artificially beautiful paintings.

His work is deliberately instantly comforting to the eye. Its prettiness is in-your-face and superficial. It is almost as if he is poking fun at his generation of Chinese, so easily attracted to the bright lights and glamour of the big cities, and to loud, colourful window displays.

Unlike many artists who utilise the brush, Hui Xin is unique. He uses a spray-gun as his primary tool, with the paint brush as a secondary tool to add the details and finishing touches. His painting technique adds to the highly stylized, artificiality of his paintings that might remind us of Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

His work is hyper-realistic, yet we know it is not real at all. Perhaps he is reminding us of how much traditional Chinese culture and heritage has been watered down and diluted in the last fifty years that these symbols and motifs have become merely pretty yet vulgar images.