Art: Glazing in best Old Master technique

Characterisation is the stuff of literature. From Hamlet to Coronation Street, a large part of the scriptwriter's power comes from creating believable personalities - just as it is in the visual arts.

This week there are two portrait shows full of characters: A True Story, by expatriate Ray Ching at Jonathan Grant Galleries in Parnell, and the sculpture of prominent German artist Karin Sander at Artspace in Karangahape Rd. One artist uses oil-painting techniques as old as Van Eyck, and the other uses computers.

Ching is the traditionalist. He first made his name in Auckland with splendid paintings of birds. The first pictures were notable mainly for mind-boggling detail of feathers and exquisite poise of composition. Then, as the artist's knowledge grew, the works achieved the higher status of exact characterisation of the bird. As a bird painter he went to Britain and, in an astonishingly short time, did the major illustrations for the monumental AA Book of British Birds. Since then he has been principally known here through reproductions.

This exhibition recovers the brilliance of the early bird paintings. It is a series of portraits with likenesses so exact that they instantly evoke the word "photographic."

The sense of photographic realism is created not just by likeness and attention to detail, but by the almost miraculous sense of skin tone and the sense of blood beneath the skin conveyed by layers of glazing in the best Old Master technique.

Yet for all their brilliant realism it is emphasised again and again that these are oil paintings, not photographs.

One way this is achieved is by extensive lettering on the painting. This emphasises the surface and the work of the hand. Inevitably, this lettering will be compared to the writing on paintings by McCahon - and in many ways the looping script forces this comparison.

Yet the writing in a McCahon painting is a prayer, whereas with Ching the aim is narrative or symbolic. In one painting of an old couple the writing simply says "tick-tock" repeatedly to symbolise the passing of time, and ends in a blank space that must be death. This is obvious stuff and adds little to the exact depiction of the dignified pair.

In another painting, of a nude young woman with a tattoo and heavy piercing through her dark nipples, the lettering is an advertisement which suggests a way of life.

Nowhere are Ching's remarkable skills seen better than in this and in a painting of two nudes, an older woman and a younger one who share blue eyes and melancholy expressions. Not only is the flesh convincingly painted, there is the specially intense realism that comes from the total absence of sentimentality.

This painting gives a sense of time and mortality that is a visual experience and does not need writing to help us feel the message.

There are paintings in the show which are fascinating as feats of illustrative draughtsmanship. Notable is a portrait of an ageing seaman, where the waves and seabirds in the background as well as the tattoos that cover his body take the place of the lettering.

The peculiar intensity of Ching's work makes a comparison with American Andrew Wyeth entirely appropriate.

Sander is at Artspace with the support of the Goethe Institute. Her tiny statues of human figures, each isolated on a pedestal under a plastic cover, are made with the help of advanced 3D scanning technology called fused deposition modelling. The innumerable thin layers of acrylic that make up each little figure can be seen, although sometimes they are fused on the surface and have been airbrushed with colour and painted details.

Despite limitations such as lack of facial detail and messiness of such things as spectacles, each of these tiny statuettes, single figures or pairs, conveys a sense of a character achieved magically by stance as well as clothing.

The characters expressed are stereotypes.

The footballer posed with his foot on the ball is every footballer. The diva in a long purple gown is every pretentious woman.

The silver-haired man with his hand in his pocket is a certain kind of self-satisfied, ageing success story, at odds with the balding man in short-sleeved shirt and tie who is a perpetual clerk. The ambiguous figure in the roll-necked pullover is typical of one sort of artistic intellectual.

The whole exhibition of 20 statues, unnamed and unnumbered, constitutes a cross-section of modern European society with each individual isolated, processed and fixed.