Maestro Xia Jing Shan (1923-2019), a giant of contemporary Buddhist painting art, known as "First Buddhist Art Maestro Across Centuries", has a position of inheriting the past and leading the future in the field of Buddhist painting and calligraphy. Master Xia's Buddhist paintings transcend religious image norms and create a new realm of trans-era aesthetics that is pure and refined. His works have been successively selected and collected as the representative of oriental art by not only "Sotheby's Institute of Art (London)", but also Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, China Beijing The Palace Museum, National Museum of China, Buddha Museum, etc.

In traditional culture, Zhong Kui is the god not only to protect and bless every household but also to subdue and eliminate demons. Among Master Xia's life-long painting career, the Zhong Kui series can best highlight his profound calligraphy and brushwork and his unique artistic color, fully expressing his understanding of the vast world. Although beginning to paint Zhong Kui at his senior age, Maestro Xia Jing Shan completed over one thousand portraits of Zhong Kui, each of which is extraordinary not only in beauty but also in artistic conception.

His inherited the styles and techniques of traditional calligraphy and painting, especially those from the Zhejiang School and Shanghai School in Ming and Qing Dynasties. He drew inspiration from the exaggerated and dramatic images of Zhong Kui but polished them with his own delicate and rich coloring style and auspicious meanings of Buddhist paintings to present a peaceful and joyful atmosphere. Different from the traditional impression of Zhong Kui in subduing and eliminating demons, his paintings of Zhong Kui have a flair of wisdom essence from Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism and are full of pictorial vocabulary of the literati, such as waterfalls, playing with cranes, drinking, and tea tasting. He injected Buddhist philosophy into the popular Zhong Kui images by using a vernacular language to write his new learning of Buddhism, conveying the idea that goodness suppresses all evils and persuading people to do good deeds and to accumulate virtue. As a result, his paintings of Zhong Kui are unique and full of contemporary feeling.

Selected for this exhibition are 16 classic masterpieces from Xia Jing Shan's Zhong Kui series and they are presented under four themes, namely household protector Zhong Kui, luck bringer Zhong Kui, literato Zhong Kui, and Buddha-mind Zhong Kui. Each of the 16 paintings is vivid and profound, reflecting how much Master Xia wished to use his traditional but innovating paintings to convey his vision of truth, goodness and beauty for the world and make people feel at ease and peaceful through the art of calligraphy and painting and the wisdom of Buddhism. As such, we also wish your new year will usher in a thousand blessings, rich and beautiful.