Advertisement

Spreading the word

Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
0

At first glance it looks like a small photo of a fish with its guts spilling out to reveal its pink, hollow insides. Click on it and the enlarged image is clearly a painting - the detail and colour lovingly recreated.

It's the work of 35-year-old artist Yang Jinsong from Chongqing, a lecturer at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, who says fish are a familiar theme in traditional Chinese painting, but are nearly always rendered alive. 'So these flayed fish are closer in imagery to still life paintings that are meant to symbolise memento mori, or memories of death,' Yang says.

The website hosting Yang's work, and that of 30,000 other artists from around the world, has an average of 11 million hits a day. And if it wasn't for British art impresario Charles Saatchi - the man behind the Brit Art phenomenon of the early 1990s and who set up the website in question (www.saatchi-gallery. co.uk/yourgallery) - Yang might never have had the chance to showcase his work so widely.

Another mainland artist on the site is Wu Zhi, who now lives and works in Amsterdam. Her featured work includes vibrant and colourful pastel drawings of dinner parties, a billiards game and a picnic.

Neeraj Rattu, head of IT at the Saatchi Gallery, had the job of implementing the new site. He says it's one of the largest interactive art galleries in the world. Late last month, in response to requests from Putonghua-speaking artists, a new Chinese-language version went live.

'People from China were saying how much they loved art, but couldn't speak English, and they really wanted to be part of this artistic community,' Rattu says. 'So we created a Chinese-language site. We wanted to break down language and cultural barriers.'

Advertisement