Artist Paints Orchid and Bamboo

Jin Xiaohai has firmly established himself as an excellent painter. He has just completed a huge traditional painting for West Hill Hall， a property of the State Council. This is not his first art assignment for a prestigious venue. His paintings have been in the collections of the Great Hall of the People， Tian’anmen， the NPC Conference Center， the State Council Conference Center and Chairman Mao Memorial. Painting for such national architectures is always considered an honorable recognition by artists across China.

Jin Xiaohai now runs an extremely busy workload. Since he completed his assignment for the State Council and came back to Hangzhou， he has been working on another big assignment: creating paintings of orchids and bamboos for a textbook to be published by a Tianjin press. He is now also to create paintings for a collection of ten contemporary artists.

The 48-year-old Jin Xiaohai is now director of Hangzhou Orchid-Pavilion Academy of Painting. He made his national debut in the 1990s when his 25-meter-long painting of 100 Orchids won a top award at a national competition jointly hosted by China Artists Association and Taiwan Traditional Chinese Painting Association. That masterpiece convinced his fellow artists that Jin is extremely good at painting orchid， a typical theme in traditional Chinese painting.

Jin Xiaohai was born in Lin’an， which used to be a rural county about 30 kilometers west of Hangzhou and now a suburban county-level city under the jurisdiction of Hangzhou. As a boy， he had a passion for picture-story books and illustrations in ancient classic novels. He began to take drawing lessons at age eight. In 1981 he took lessons from Lu Yifei， a professor of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts， the predecessor of present-day China Academy of Art. In 1989， Jin entered the academy and majored in traditional Chinese painting. The studies at the academy gave him a solid foundation for further fruitful exploration in the beauty of the traditional art.

Jin Xiaohai is accomplished in painting plum blooms， orchids， bamboos， chrysanthemums， which are four major themes of the Chinese traditional painting. His art reflects both traditional elements from masters of the past and innovation of his own. In particular， his orchids are perfection itself. They bear scrutiny and every detail is a masterstroke. □