The Hive Centre for Contemporary Art has the greatest honor to announce that the exhibition Hive • Becoming IX Ji Xin: Nightingale will be inaugurated at 4:00 p.m. on the 20th of September, 2014. The exhibition will present the young artist Ji Xin from the China Academy of Art. The exhibition will last till the 20th of October, 2014.

Ji Xin draws from elements of classical painting, arranging them together like a bonsai landscape to insert his classical tastes into the painting. Whether it is his landscapes, color tones, figures, or certain other details, we seem to be able to find their prototypes within art history. He alters these elements to suit his own tastes. In these pictures full of the elements of fairytales and mystery, we can often read new compositions of things long passed.

The red globe that often emerges in Ji Xin’s paintings comes from Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving Melancholia. The appearance of this small globe stirs up a once pure and tranquil classical painting, like a drop of acid into clear water, or an unidentified intruder suddenly crashing into a fairytale, forever altering the atmosphere.

The people in Ji Xin’s paintings, be they female celebrities, Albert Einstein, or even the artist’s self-portrait, have been bestowed with a classical “look.” In their faces, we can recognize the faces of Ingres or Rembrandt, or the classic beauties of antique calendar prints. Ji Xin has so infused his faces with this “classical look” that we get a strange sense of temporal dislocation as history and individual tastes intersect.