Master class in oil painting

The current exhibition has Bada Shanren, a painting Jin did in 2006 for his second exhibition at the National Art Museum of China.

He says it was a "painstaking" process to complete the work as he experimented a great deal to capture the simple, unworldly sides of Bada Shanren (born as Zhu Da), one of the greatest classic Chinese painters and calligraphers of the 17th century who lived his life in chaos and solitude.

In the work, he arranges different shades of gray for the painter's gown, the rock he sits on, and the water and the sky to depict Qingyunpu in Nanchang, where Bada Shanren once lived.

Wu Weishan, the director of the National Art Museum of China, says the painting of Bada Shanren transmits the loneliness and distance in his character, and also the poetry and serenity of Chinese aesthetics.

"One can see in this painting the temperament of a typical Chinese intellectual hidden inside Jin," Wu says.

It has taken decades for Jin to evolve from a teenage art student, who once came last in a sketching test, into a mature painter who also educated several generations of Chinese artists. Jin taught in and headed the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing from the 1950s to 2001.