She wears jade earrings and a midnight blue jacket, embroidered in gold to its mandarin collar. She sits very still, staring straight back at you from her watchful closeup. You could pick her out of a crowd, this shrewd woman with the incisive look and stringently combed hair – except that she no longer exists. For this is not now.
Nor is this a photograph, as it might at first seem, skimming a face from life in some Chinese city. In fact this is an ancestral portrait from Guanghzu province, painted in ink on paper at some unknown date in the 19th century. In the past, such images were posthumous, the faces chosen from albums of generic types, accessorised with personal ornaments and displayed in family shrines. But this one is so hyperreal in its exactitude of face, clothes and pose as to be clearly based on a photograph: Chinese art in the age of the camera.
