Wang Xisan
Lineage & School of Heritage
Wang Xisan was born in Beijing. After graduating from senior high school, he entered the Beijing Research Institute of Arts and Crafts, where he took the renowned inside-painting artist Ye Xiaofeng as his teacher, becoming the first bearer from outside the Ye family in the 'Ye school' of inside painting, an art transmitted within the family for five generations.
Mastery, Signature Works & Repertoire
Male, of Han ethnicity, born in 1938, a native of Fucheng, Hebei. A national representative bearer of Hengshui Inside-painted Art, a first-batch national intangible cultural heritage project, and a master of Chinese arts and crafts. During the Cultural Revolution he was sent back to his native place; in 1977 he was transferred back to Hengshui, where he established a factory for special arts and crafts. His works cover a wide range of subjects, uniting form and spirit, with painting and calligraphy given equal prominence. He introduced into inside painting the brush techniques of Chinese painting, such as cun (texture strokes), ca (rubbing), ran (washing), dian (dotting), gou (outlining), and si (silk-thread strokes), wielding the brush with great flexibility. He also absorbed the strengths of the other sister arts, and invented the 'metal-shaft hooked brush' now widely used in the field of inside painting, as well as pioneering the technique of oil-color inside painting.
Honors & Recognition
Since 1968 he has trained a great number of promising newcomers in inside painting, and he is the founder of the 'Ji school' of inside-painted snuff-bottle art. In 1983 the International Snuff Bottle Society elected him its first Chinese honorary member. His representative works include the snuff-bottle series Portraits of Successive Presidents of the United States, Famous Rulers of China Through the Ages (Zhongguo Lidai Mingjun), and A Collection of Rare Treasures (Zhenpin Tu).
References & Archival Sources
Representative Items of This Bearer
Profile
This static English edition is rendered at the edge for search engines, AI crawlers and readers without JavaScript. Compiled from official national representative bearer archival records, organized by topic and translated into English. 阅读中文版。