Cover Story

Title: A Picture in a Picture

Medium: Mixed media on card

Description: By creating a translucent window on Xuan paper with oil, it allows the artist to go beyond the physical restraints of the present scene on the painting into a different time and space. For example, this picture showing a lady studying a huge landscape painting, is in fact a composite artwork consisting of two overlapping pictures (figure below). The translucent window on the Xuan paper gives a distinctive frosty feel to the image behind, which would be difficult to reproduce otherwise. However, as I have only used this technique for a few months, I have no long term data to show whether this effect will wear off with time, but so far, there is no suggestion that it will.

Having been trained as a surgeon-scientist, I applied a scientific approach to further study the effect of different oils on paper. I applied the same amount of oil from different sources onto the same Xuan paper and compared the effects of creating translucency by the ease of reading the smallest print on a newspaper through the treated Xuan paper by different members of my household who were blinded to the oils used. The olive oil used for cooking consistently scores the highest in rendering translucency. Because of the unknown long term results of oil on Xuan paper, I have applied fixative (designed to spray on finished artwork) routinely to these paintings.

Artist: Anthony P Yim, MD

Having graduated from Cambridge with double First Class Honors in Medical Sciences Tripos (Part II Pathology), Dr Anthony PC Yim was admitted to Oxford University Medical School on the Hobson Memorial Scholarship, where he graduated with distinction. He pursued a career in cardiothoracic surgery and was trained in some of the top medical institutions, both in UK and USA. He returned to Hong Kong in 1992 to join the Department of Surgery at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He pioneered the development of Minimally Invasive Thoracic Surgery or keyhole surgery of the chest, which earned him a widely acclaimed international reputation. He was promoted to be the Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery in 1995, and Chair Professor of Surgery in 2002. In 2017, he decided to give up his highly successful career as a surgeon to pursue after his childhood dream of being an artist."