Jin Sha was born in 1968 in Beijing. He graduated from the Chinese Painting Department of Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 1992, and first arrived in Sydney in 1989, later obtaining Australian permanent residency in 2000. In 2009, he curated Zhongjian: Midway, a touring exhibition of contemporary Australian art for the Wollongong Art Gallery. The show successfully travelled across fourteen art galleries in Australia and China, earning widespread acclaim in both countries. He is now Vice President of the Beijing Art Institute of Chinese Gongbi Painting, and lives and works between Sydney and Beijing.

Jin practises gongbi, the meticulous fine brushwork of natural mineral colours on silk. His signature Salute to Masters series recontextualises canonical European paintings through his own philosophy. He extracts every human figure, leaving only garments and props, so that one's gaze passes through the space a body should have blocked. He likens this to liubai ( 留白 ), the "intended blank" through which the viewer enters the work, filling it with symbols of temptation and decline — reading contemporary China against the prosperity and decay of Renaissance Europe.

Jin has exhibited across Australia, including at Wollongong Art Gallery, Mosman Art Gallery, Albury Regional Art Gallery (now Murray Art Museum Albury), Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Cairns Art Gallery, Casula Powerhouse Art Centre, Western Sydney University, and in the solo exhibitions Ling Yun (2023) and Blue Veil (2026) with REDBASE Art Sydney. He has also exhibited across China, Japan, the United States and Europe, and has been collected by the National Art Museum of China and other institutions in China, Japan, and United States.