Jiang Zhi

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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”.