Jiang Zhi

A stand-alone security checkpoint appears on a deserted seashore, setting the stage for Jiang Zhi’s The Waves (2022). A man carrying a suitcase emerges from the sea and approaches the seashore, being subjected to a series of security checks. He is examined for whether he meets certain standards, even whether he is human. Security checks are undoubtedly an exemplification of social institutionalization and politicization. The physical contact in security screening is an expression of authority. The cognitive process seeks to gain knowledge on the subject, and is one that exerts dominance, revealing the lust for power and control. Over time, people have succumbed to security examinations. Their subconscious have been disciplined, moulding them into people who comply with “safety standards”, rejecting those who do not conform. The film shows how physical contact between two bodies can become a catalyst, materialising the symbiotic relationship existent between them. The dynamic between the security guard and traveller dramatically transforms; as they interact, the power structure between them starts to collapse.

Jiang Zhi’s ongoing paintings from The world is yours, as well as ours is a visual materialization of landscapes and figures. Exploring the relationship between abstraction and figuration, the artist believes that all visual images are influenced by our intrinsic understanding of signs and symbols, and are viewed subjectively through an amalgamation of emotion, consciousness, ideas, and mixed experiences. Using complex and diverse photographic, silk screening, and digital imaging methods to generate his paintings, Jiang reflects on our constantly metamorphosing psyche within contemporary society.

Using new materials and techniques, Jiang fabricates refreshing colors and synthetic textures. Within his process, he explores possibilities between control and spontaneity, revealing and concealing, conceptual implementation and deviation, the real and the imagined, linearity and accumulation of time and existence. Jiang constantly explores and expands on his understanding of multidimensional intersections, believing that encountering these intersections within spectrums of contrasting principles bring meaning and character to our world.

Seven Blind People is a series of seven paintings that form a visual parable, negating the centrality of sight and thereby challenges the chasm between optical visuality and sensual imagination. Jiang believes that only by embracing Formlessness and liberating the Form from its representation, can the artist become one with chance encounters, polymorphous relationality, and sensual confrontations. How would a blind person (those who are in an unconventional system) paint? There shall be no limit, but unfettered and pure creation.

Skeletons and skulls emerge as key motifs in the paintings. Building on the Christian tradition of memento mori, Jiang allows these visceral bodies to convey the inner state of being alive, an interiority turned external. The tempest of events and experiences from the past year overwhelms and hollows one’s mind, melting faces and dissolving brains, leaving behind the cranium.  As the status quo of existing order and systems is destroyed and annihilated, a “new world” must rise from the dead. What would this new world look like? The artist thoughtfully asks about the new “self”, for the new world is made up of the connection of the “many”.

Jiang’s exploration of corporeality materializes in the Human Body series. These are sanguine bodies that are full of life force and vitality, as oil pigments become blood, and brush strokes show veins and musculature out of a chaotic background. The series ends with a Gericault-like composition in Human Body No.6, where a pale body, no less erotic, lies lifeless on an abstract ground. Life and death entwine in the now and disappear into each other.

Skeletons and skulls emerge as key motifs in the paintings. Building on the Christian tradition of memento mori, Jiang allows these visceral bodies to convey the inner state of being alive, an interiority turned external. As the status quo of existing order and systems is destroyed and annihilated, a “new world” must rise from the dead. What would this new world look like? The artist thoughtfully asks about the new “self”, for the new world is made up of the connection of the “many”.

In the Woods depicts a group of buoyant youths entering a forest. Their exuberant celebration and youthful jouissance are quickly interrupted by the sudden attack of helium balloons, and a choreographed wuxia fighting ensues. These balloons take on a range of symbolism, from the vivacity of childhood imagination and Disney romance, to inauthentic fear and imagined hostility. That such childhood playthings become agents of vicious violence is a fateful betrayal of the promise of happiness.

In the Fade series, the artist replaces the real and transient subjects in Love Letters with acrylic, silk and glass flowers that are artificial, seemingly permanent, and ever-green, though showing traces of dust and time. By reconstructing the décor of a common Chinese household in the 1980s, the artist allegorises the foregone epochal aestheticism and romantic imagination of a good life. This vision stands as a stark contrast to our present age, where one enjoys an ever-accelerating pace of change and volatility, yet foregoing a safe space to deposit one’s feelings and desires. This also reveals the artist’s meditation on classical Chinese philosophy, that things are “neither new nor old, neither leaving nor coming”.

In the Going-and-coming series, the artist utilises the dried flowers left from Love Letters and captures the different moments when they move about on a spinning table, suspended in a temporal series of movement and fragments, ever returning and reincarnating. Engaging with the materiality of oil pigment and the porousness of silk screens, the artist composes the painting in verso and recto, and disrupts the illusion of coherence and linearity. These flowers thus achieve a second life through the reappearance of heterogeneity through the representation of homogeneity, purporting a way to perceive the organic multiplicity of life.

The four-channel video, In the Wind, consists of four interweaving scenes, “Sisyphus’s boulder”, “Father’s back”, “Shifting trees”, and “Tempest”. As the endlessly shrill winds subsume all the suffering, misfit, loneliness and fluctuation of being, time passes in its sheer violence and annihilation. The indescribability of the wind characterizes the individual’s ontology and destination, which are uncertain, irretrievable and untraceable.

Jiang Zhi’s iconic Love Letters is an on-going photographic series stretching from 2010 to 2014. Part mourning ritual and part elegiac poetry, the series poignantly connects the transience of blooming flowers to the instantaneity of inevitable death, both of which are abundantly represented across different cultures. Jiang set different kinds of flowers ablaze, and captured the split second when petals and flame coexisted in an elegant equanimity. The artist has thus staged a visceral way to mourn, to imagine suffering, and to create an atemporal moment suspended between destruction and rebirth, agony and sweet melancholy.

0.7% Salt is composed of a still close-up shot of Gillian Chung, a celebrity singer-actress from Hong Kong. The video displays the minute changes in facial expressions as Gillian slowly starts crying. Jiang Zhi stages Gillian’s tears to critique the way society and media place moral judgments on women. The video did not reason objectively why Gillian was crying, rather it allows for an undecidability between “truth” and “fiction”. What is reality in the media’s portrayal of a public figure? The multiplicity of subjectivities makes it difficult to tell for sure. Between perception and judgment, an individual should have the space to smile or cry.

In Curtain Call,  An actress responds to the repeated curtain calls in various ways, fascinating and charming the audience in a final act, as if it was an ultimate flirtation under the name of ‘farewell’. In a final straw of comedic intervention, the actress had to be dragged off stage. The curtain call becomes a “post-performance” that is self-reflexive and inauthentic. It breaks the fourth wall and is fully aware of its performativity, while ritualistically, if not under false pretense, distorting the temporality of the spectacle.

Forefinger (1999) is an early iconic work by Jiang Zhi. Forefinger (1999) is a documentary interviewing the eponymous Forefinger, a well-known poet who underwent the violence of the Cultural Revolution and torment of mental illness.

The MuMu series is an extended narrative that examines the relation between observation and existence. Jiang Zhi traveled with a wooden doll that he discovered in a second hand market and named “MuMu”. From the south of the lower reaches of Yangtze River, to the sea and across the desert, Jiang took photos of the doll and spun her stories. The peace and harmony in these stories mask the changing times, as MuMu embodies an imaginary escape from the chaotic reality into a utopia.

In the Sucker series, the straw becomes a link between people and a metaphor for the complex human relationships in real life. This series was presented at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.