Chinese artist Zha Sai was born in Wuhan, the capital of the Hubei Province in Central China, in 1974. Her father was a printmaker who worked at the Hubei Art Academy, and she credits the distinctive artistic atmosphere of her upbringing—shuttling back and forth from the printmaking, sculpture, drawing, and other studios—for subtly impacting her life and work. When she was fifteen, she pursued a systematic and strict art education in traditional techniques of describing the objective world at the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts. At nineteen, she entered the Printmaking Department of the Institute and later earned a master’s degree there.
Sai’s work seeks to capture her impression of the natural environment of her home in Wuhan, a large city situated on the banks of the Yangtze River in Hubei Province, an area known as the “Thousand Lakes Place.” She is currently a Professor of Printmaking at the institute. Sai enjoys the meditative, repetitive quality of and concentration required in carving reduction woodcuts, saying, “I consider art applicable to everything and see a parallel in the way I work to that of music and literature.”
1 work
1 work