For centuries, honouring ancestors has been central to Chinese culture with ancestor paintings offering a unique blend of artistic portraiture and reverence for family history.
A Chinese dragon floor rug, rice paper paintings and chairs from the Qing dynasty also feature in the exhibition.
Oasis Gallery owners Greg and Katy Waite have travelled Asia over the last 25 years collecting artwork from Indonesia, Malaysia and China.
Mr Waite said they had been ‘‘fortunate’’ to discover the paintings.
‘‘Katie and I first encountered Chinese ancestor portraits in Bali in about 2000 — it just blew me away. I’d never seen anything like it,’’ he said.
The exhibition paintings are all from the Qing Dynasty (1636/1644-1912) from around 1700 to 1800, Mr Waite said.
He had made a ‘‘deliberate accumulation’’ of the paintings due to his fascination with them and bought the current collection from a friend, now deceased, who had purchased and restored the ‘‘incredibly old paintings’’ in Macau, Mr Waite said.
‘‘We don’t even understand the quality of those traditions — there’s that absolute respect for history, for ancestry and the way of doing things.
‘‘The portraits are very formal and the subjects are dressed in formal attire, sometimes they’re painted from memory but they all have very distinct levels within society and there are all sorts of symbols that are attached to that.’’
The portraits depict ‘‘incredibly important’’ subjects including a possible concubine connected to the Royal family who had lived in Edinburgh and a high court judge, he said.
While the artists are unknown, Mr Waite said there were ‘‘countless paintings’’ that were lost during the Cultural Revolution in China where they were ‘‘burned in the tens of thousands’’.
‘‘Which is why the ones from Indonesia are preserved because they’ve stayed within families,’’ he said.
The Waites, who were based in Bali from 2002 until 2016, opening Oasis Gallery in Oamaru in 2012, also collected wedding baskets which were important in the lives of the Chinese family.
The baskets were traditionally used during a couple’s engagement and filled with dowry gifts with food such as dried fruit, nuts and sweets for the bride’s family.
‘‘It’s about the start of the next generation, the wedding baskets are housed within the kitchens of the home and they are lent to the young couple and then after their period of honeymoon, or engagement, the baskets are returned to the family.
‘‘In Bali and Malaysia , the Chinese follow traditions very closely, ’’ Mr Waite said.
The exhibition features a painting by 19th century portraitist, Charles Goldsborough Anderson, of the Chinese Ambassador in London from 1898-1901, His Excellency Sir Chih-Chen Lo-Feng-Luh.
He was minister plenipotentiary of His Majesty the Emperor of China to her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress of India, which empowered him with ‘‘full powers’’.
‘‘Queen Victoria actually fell in love with him and knighted him. You’re not supposed to knight a foreigner, but she did,’’ Mr Waite said.
‘‘He was a linguist, an Oxford graduate and he was apparently an astonishing man and did wonderful things for Chinese-British relations which had been utterly destroyed post-Boxer Rebellion because the British had been, and all Europeans had been, incredibly badly behaved in China’’.
The exhibition runs until March 22.
