Jimmy He

Jimmy He showed an early interest in painting and was long term mentored by the acclaimed contemporary Chinese oil painter Professor Jun De Chen from Shanghai Theatre Academy. His early influences were inspired by the works of Cezanne and Van Gough as well as traditional art such as the wall paintings from the Yongle Palace. His interest in the Chinese calligraphy characters is evident in his work, as the rich traditions of Chinese brushwork and ink painting that he draws upon revealing an expression of deep spiritual concerns and beliefs. Jimmy migrated to Australia in 1987 and later moved to Tasmania in 1998, maintaining a determined commitment to making art. Jimmy He paints an abstract expressionistic landscape that reveals the inner beauty of the spiritual landscape of Tasmania. His recent paintings reveal a strong influence of the style of Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning as he does not conform to the constraints of traditional Chinese pictorialism. He explores the very essence of painting landscapes, deriving pleasure in the sense of place and in the landscape itself through the act of inscribing it into what appears calligraphic characters from the Oracle Bone Script and the Cursive or Grass scripts (Tang Dynasty). Jimmy He’s oil paintings reveal a deeply sensuous communication with the landscape whilst signifying the fundamental significance of the environment to our survival and our future. Drawing on memories and language from a different tradition of the place, he gives new understandings of the Australian landscape as being fluid and spiritual, unfolding phenomenologically as thinking paintings that speak directly with the landscape.