Shan Sa is perhaps best known as the author of The Girl Who Played Go, the novel she wrote in French. However, from a young age she has also been a painter and poet, learning calligraphy and traditional Chinese watercolour painting at seven, and publishing a book of poems at eight. Having previously exhibited ink and watercolour works here in Shanghai, on this visit she is showing dramatic abstract oil paintings – alien planets with their own emotional lives.

Since the very beginning, Shan Sa’s art education has been unique. As a girl, she says, “My grandmother, and also the mistress of my grandfather, both of them were painters, so they taught me as competitors. I didn’t know the real relationship between them.”

In 1990, aged 17, Shan Sa left her native Beijing for Paris where she studied philosophy. On graduating she found another artist mentor in the Polish-French painter Balthus, her best friend Hitomi's father, when she worked as an assistant for his wife. 

"The beauty of the oil is that although they are colours that cannot be seen, under this painting there is another painting."

Balthus seems a strange ally for a philosopher and author, being famously dismissive of explaining his art or imposing biographical narratives on it. In 1968 he sent a telegram to the Tate Gallery, who were organising an exhibition of his work, with instructions on how to preface it. It read, “No biographical details. Begin: Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. Now let us look at the pictures. Regards. B.” Yet Shan Sa says, “there was an immediate fusion” when she turned up on his doorstep on holiday.

Shan Sa is much more forthcoming about her own work.

“The material determines and dominates the inspiration and also the expression of myself,” she says. “I started oil painting only five years ago. It was very new and when you change the medium it gives you a lot of frustration because you don’t get the same effect that you know through your technique. The technique changes completely. And I went through this frustration, and the hatred of myself, and then one day the oil dynamic came to me, which is completely different from the ink. It's like one person with two personalities. So I should say this [oil painting] is my male part because those paintings are strong and deep and have a lot of energy.”

In discussing her paintings, Shan Sa often personifies them, crafting hidden characters on her canvases. Her oil paintings’ surfaces hint at greater depth, like the telling details that novelists use to get a character ‘in’.

“Oil painting is layered,” Shan Sa says. “And the beauty of the oil is that although they are colours that cannot be seen, under this painting there is another painting. I work a lot on the hidden part, on the hidden painting. You draw the power, only you don’t know where it comes from. This is the beauty of the oil but that I cannot use in the watercolour work.

Watercolour is immediate. You cannot change it. If you fail you have to throw the paper. This is the Chinese traditional process. "You pen it and if you don’t feel it, just throw it away because otherwise you cannot even finish. You never come back to your line.

“So the watercolour is like a naïve girl that pleases by its purity and simplicity and also the length of beauty. But oil is like a dangerous man who has several personalities. The complexity of a person still can be seen even though you don’t know why you are attracted to them.”

Shan Sa Exhibition, until late October. Elisabeth de Brabant, 299 Fuxing Xi Lu,

near Huashan Lu. Tel: 6466 7428.

Web: www.elisabethdebrabant.com

ART NEWS

The Sovereign Asian Art Foundation Prize

The 30 finalists for the US$25,000 (RMB 170,000) Sovereign Asian Art Foundation Prize were recently announced, and they include a number of Chinese and expat artists living in China. Chinese artists’ works include Yanyan Hou’s playful, reference-laden painting ‘Dinner’ (pictured), and Jiagang Chen's multiple exposure photographs of a fertiliser factory and a fruit stall which ask why we don’t just use the factories to make fruit. Work by expats includes Ben McMillan’s amazing building construction pictures, and accidental street art found by Oak Taylor Smith. Vote for your favourites at www.sovereignartfoundation.com

Thing(s) Rights 09 @ Shanghai Art Gallery

Wu Shanzhuan and Inga Svala Thorsdottir, artists from China and Iceland respectively, collaborate to create paintings and sculptures that give things – physical, inanimate things – a voice. They see a fundamental dignity in objects that we usually reserve for human beings. It’s wry and subtly political work.

Until 15 November. Shanghai Gallery of Art, 3F, Three on the Bund, Zhongshan Dong Yi Lu, near Guangdong Lu.

Jiang Zhi:

Attitude @ Osage Shanghai

Some of Jiang Zhi’s work recalls Samuel Taylor Wood’s famous men crying series. ‘0.7% Salt’ is a video of actress Gillian Chung weeping, an act stripped of context that thus deprives viewers of an obvious attitudinal stance.

Until 8 November. Osage Gallery, 93 Doulun Lu, near Sichuan Bei Lu. Tel: 5671 3605. Web: www.osagegallery.com