Art that addresses our moral failures
My works are meditations on the mountains and waters as the image of our own moral failures.
Yun-Fei Ji
During a recent trip to the Vancouver Art Gallery, I was delighted to discover several contemporary Chinese artists in an exhibition called "
Unscrolled". I wanted to write about all of the artists in the show, but in light of the
recent oil spill in English Bay outside of Vancouver, I decided to focus on the art of
Yun-Fei Ji , who describes his paintings of the mountains and rivers and displaced citizens affected by the development of the
Three Gorges Dam, as depicting "our moral failures".
Yun-Fei Ji's work is fascinating because it plays with the tradition of Chinese landscape painting, while introducing a very dark and haunting contemporary subject matter: the displacement of people and environmental destruction caused by the Three Gorges Dam. A major theme in
Yun-Fei Ji's work, as described in an article in the
New York Times, is man's interconnectedness with nature. Rather than criticizing the Three Gorges hydroelectric dam project directly, his drawings focus on depicting people in the context of the natural world and their struggles to come to terms with their world collapsing around them. Landscape painting tradition in Chinese art was seen as a way to retreat from society's problems; Yun-Fei Ji shows that because of mankind's impact on nature, the landscape can no longer be a retreat.
There are several online sources from which you can learn more about
Yun-Fei Ji's work. The
Ulla Center for Contemporary Art's website has some excellent images of his work as it is installed in a gallery space. An article in the
Contemporary Art Magazine of China gives a political overview of
Yun-Fei Ji's work from the Chinese perspective. In an interview by John Yau in the
Brooklyn Rail, he focuses on the work made about the Three Gorges Dam.
A recent conversation
with Christine Ho, Yun-Fei Ji talks about his art education after the Cultural Revolution:
University Museum of Contemporary Art. A short video on the
James Cohan Gallery website, reveals the artist's process of witnessing the displacement and destruction caused by the Three Gorges Dam. A 2013 book called
Yun-Fei Ji Water Work documents ten years of human displacement by water-related disasters, including Hurricane Katrina.
One of the works on display at the Vancouver Art Gallery is discussed in detail in an audio panel discussion for the Museum of Modern Art:
The Scroll and the Story of the Three Gorges. The work, made from over 500 woodblock prints, and it is a spectacular juxtaposition of the hand painting (the watercolour background spaces) with reproduced images (see image below). His work often combines woodblock printing, ink drawing and watercolour painting with all these techniques merging and overlapping to the point the viewer can't discern where one ends and another begins.
For those of you who missed this exhibition at the VAG, a catalogue is available:
Unscrolled. It is definitely worth checking out, as each of the artists in this exhibition gives us insight into the state of contemporary art in China. They use the context of Chinese historical art and reimagine its parameters to speak about the world they are living in today.
