Quyi is a popular form of traditional Chinese theater, which brings together singing, storytelling, dance, and juggling. It features all sorts of characters: masculine (sheng) and feminine (dan), young and old, good and bad, serious and comical. The series of photographs by Jin Xin is not an illustration of the Chinese theater; rather, the photographer explores the soul of the character, his or her emotions, through diptychs that are like extensions of the actor’s thought process, like an open door. Painted faces and ornately clothed bodies reveal a strange and gentle poetry that is like a distant echo. Jin Xin likes to evoke the following poem:
The art of Quyi, when the artists are on the stage,
Their eyes closed, deep into their own worlds.
What are they imagining?
A field on fire,
dust-covered shoes,
their family ever more distant…?
For these artists, Quyi is not an art, it’s a passion.
