With a focus on the body—clothed and unclothed—Wilson Shieh produces witty, exquisitely rendered paintings of men, women, and children in all states of dress. He revels in fashion as a form of identity and has dressed his figures in outlandish outfits, including gowns mimicking Hong Kong architecture and haute couture concoctions inspired by animals. He paints in the gongbi style, an ancient Chinese technique in which finely outlined images are filled in with meticulously applied layers of ink. For Shieh, this blending of ancient and contemporary is inherent in gongbi painting, as he describes: “In the process of learning gongbi portraits, I felt that many qualities of ancient works have a contemporaneity to them. Thus, I attempted to master the technique and apply it to modern and personal subject matter, hoping to produce a new kind of art.”