Yun-Fei Ji: moral vistas: the New York-based Chinese painter presents densely figured landscapes and interiors as a form of social critique - Biography

Art in America, June, 2003 by Robert Knafo

Yun-Fei Ji's artistic project, driven by a deep ethical impulse, is centered on tightly packed ink-and-pigment scenes on paper, populated by often disturbing, sometimes raunchy historical and allegorical figures. Large multiple-view works like The Picnic (2001) are hybrid creations--part history painting, part symbolic landscape, part documentary (and, at times, autobiographical) sketchbook. Distinctly Chinese in their visual elements, all affirm the personal and subjective over the public and official; all seamlessly mingle the real and the mythological, the factual and the phantasmagoric. The teeming figures, seemingly one with and animating the earth, carry both traditional and idiosyncratic associations. The result, Ji observes in a recent unpublished essay, is "a meditation on the land as the image of our own moral failure." (1)

Ji was born in Beijing in 1963, the son of a People's Liberation Army doctor and his wife, and grew up in the provincial city of Hangzhou, on a military base where his father ran a clinic. When he was 10, his mother sent him to study with an officer who drew illustrations for PLA combat-training manuals. Later, as a precocious adolescent student at the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts in the late '70s, Ji saw his teachers have to paint and repaint scenes containing top government officials so as to reflect the most recent reshufflings of political power. Formal strictures at the Academy were equally galling. On the heels of the Cultural Revolution, with art schools only recently reopened, his instructors were still making history and propaganda paintings in the classic rosy-cheeked Socialist Realist style. Among students, knowledge of more experimental Western developments remained stunted, indeed virtually nonexistent--terminating with Rodin and Renoir.

Disdaining this approved esthetic, Ji took a trip, in retrospect a kind of artistic pilgrimage, to the ancient Silk Road area of northwestern China, where he viewed the celebrated Buddhist frescoes (ca. 400-1400 A.D.) in the Mogao cave temples near Dunhuang. He recalls his excitement at confronting these great storytelling cycles, many depicting episodes from the Buddha's life, and being overwhelmed by the narrative force, the immediacy, the sheer inventiveness on display before him. He went on to create a number of works inspired by the experience.

In 1986, Ji left China on a scholarship to the Fulbright College of Art and Science at the University of Arkansas, from which he graduated three years later with an MFA. He has lived in New York since 1990. His exhibition history includes solo shows at Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp and the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, as well as participation in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and group surveys at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Conn., and New York's Drawing Center and P.S. 122. A selection of new works goes on view Nov. 14 at Pierogi in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, and a traveling one-person show opens Jan. 16, 2004, at the St. Louis Art Museum.

In the artist's recent paintings, one encounters many historical and cross-cultural references. The Elegant Gathering (2002) shows a corrupt gerontocracy ruling over today's China, as members lounge amid a grove of bamboo (long a symbol, in its flexibility, for the Confucian virtues of humility, compliance and compromise) where a white crane (an emblem of aloofness, independence and purity) stands in vivid contrast to the aged, crooked bureaucrats. The political revenge fantasy Rebellion of the Singing Girls (2002) shows similarly powerful old men systematically pleasured and dispatched by modern-day versions of the Red Lanterns, former prostitutes who turned themselves into guerrillas during the Boxer Rebellion. The troublesome legacy of the West pervades Dinner in the Forbidden City (2001), in which monster-faced British soldiers, reminiscent of 19th-century opium-trade enforcers, tromp through a chaotic landscape. And almost always present, either disguised as gnarled pines or actually playing themselves, are the doggedly enduring common people.

Some of the works become politically rhetorical. The Forbidden City Ghosts (2002) offers a return of the repressed on an epic scale, a memory-and-fantasy harvest from the bad old days of the Maoist enterprise. The landscape has Ji's typical tipped-to-the-surface flatness, a device familiar from traditional Asian painting, which allows viewers to survey a rich spread of totalitarian offenses. The scene is anchored in the left middle ground by a nude virago of a Madame Mao, who masturbates with a sizable dildo while presiding over the murder of a political rival at the hands of a masked Lin Biao, once the designated heir to Mao. To the right sits a somnolent, patently oblivious Buddha-like Mao, naked and slavishly attended by scantily clad concubines. It's a latter-day imperial family in deep dysfunction, playing out a "Forbidden City Macbeth," as the artist puts it. The dictatorial couple is surrounded by a maelstrom of demons and dunce-capped and/or animal-headed human figures--the ghosts of history. "I grew up with ghost stories--I know the dead are present among the living," the artist says, explaining the frequency of wavering, transparent figures in his oeuvre.