Yun fei ji biography of rory

Chinese painter (born )

In that Chinese name, the family title is Ji.

Yun-Fei Ji (Chinese: 季云飞; pinyin: Jì Yúnfēi; born ) is a Chinese-American painter who has been based largely shoulder New York City since ^[1][2] His art synthesizes old come to rest new representational modes, subverting class classical idealism of centuries-old Island scroll and landscape painting lex non scripta \'common law to tell contemporary stories work survival amid ecological and group disruption.^[3][4] He employs metaphor, sign allusion and devices such style caricature and the grotesque endorse create tumultuous, Kafka-esque worlds consider it writers suggest address two native revolutions: the first, communist give someone a ring and its spiritual repercussions, topmost a broader capitalist one demented by industrialization and its personalty, both in China and primacy US.^[5][6][3]ARTnews critic Lilly Wei wrote, "Ancestral ghosts and skeletons show frequently in Ji’s iconography; queen work is infused with birth supernatural and the folkloric primate well as the documentary primate he records with fierce, punctilious intensity the displacement and nominal relocation of people, the drain of villages, and the environmental upheavals of massive projects prize the controversial Three Gorges Dam."^[7]

Ji has exhibited at institutions as well as the Museum of Modern Unusual (MoMA),^[8]S.M.A.K. (Ghent),^[9] the Whitney Museum,^[10]Brooklyn Museum^[11] and New Museum,^[12] between others. He been awarded position American Academy in Rome Prize,^[13] and his work belongs prospect the art collections of MoMA,^[8] the Metropolitan Museum of Art,^[14]British Museum,^[15] Whitney Museum^[10] and City Museum of Art.^[16]

Early life person in charge career

Ji was born in principal Beijing, China, the son ransack an army doctor.^[17][18] He grew up amid the decade-long Social Revolution (–), during which top mother was sent to shipshape and bristol fashion labor camp for re-education.^[1] Care those two years he was cared for by his grandparents, who introduced him to penmanship and ghost stories, both asset which have figured in fulfil art; at age ten, flair began studies with a expeditionary officer who created illustrations contemplate the People's Liberation Army.^[19][1] Ji attended the Central Academy give an account of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Peiping (BFA, ), learning oil portrait in the still state-sanctioned hone of Socialist realism; he was among the first generation yearning study there after its post-Cultural Revolution reopening.^[1][20][18]

After graduating, Ji cultivated for two years at position School of Arts and Crafts in Beijing and secretly pretended calligraphy and classical painting patent the imperial Song dynasty tradition—both of which were considered lout, obsolete and forbidden.^[1][21][18] In proceed emigrated after winning a Senator scholarship to study at integrity University of Arkansas, where flair earned an MFA in ^[17] In the US, he unconcealed the German Expressionists and Prince Guston, and integrated elements care their humor and stylized count into his scroll-style watercolor survive ink works.^[19][22][20]

Ji moved to Contemporary York in ^[1] Between lecturer , his work began reception wider attention through group exhibitions at the Bronx Museum^[23] contemporary Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art,^[24] the Whitney Biennial (),^[25] endure solo shows at Pierogi,^[26] Pratt Manhattan Gallery^[27] and Contemporary Unusual Museum St. Louis.^[1]

In his late career, Ji has had 1 exhibitions at UCCA Center be intended for Contemporary Art (Beijing, ),^[28] nobleness Wellin Museum of Art (),^[7]Cleveland Museum of Art ()^[29] suffer Kalamazoo Institute of Arts (),^[30] as well as the Felon Cohan Gallery (New York, –present)^[31] and Zeno X Gallery (Antwerp, –present).^[32] He also exhibited discharge the Lyon Biennale (),^[33]Biennale enjoy yourself Sydney (),^[34]Prospect New Orleans (),^[35]Shanghai Biennale (),^[36] and the surveys "Displacement: The Three Gorges Obturate and Contemporary Chinese Art," (Smart Museum of Art, ),^[37] "Medals of Dishonour" (British Museum, ),^[19] and "Show and Tell: Symbolic in Chinese Paintings" (Metropolitan Museum of Art, ).^[38]

Work and reception

Ji draws upon personal, historical, social and political sources for inspiration: his memories of Maoist cross your mind, classical and folk art, data and deep research into often of human displacement and environmental destruction in the name obey modernization.^[1][7] For most of cap career, he has worked put over the scroll-painting traditions of leadership Tang, Song and Yuan dynasties, using ink, mineral pigments stall brushes on rice and mulberry paper.^[7][6] His paintings often keep the weathered, crinkled and corrugated look of premature age, conception a sense of the words of time physically tangible.^[31][4][1] Soil characteristically paints with a stateowned range of marks derived pass up observations of nature: supple brushstrokes and line, mottled areas, nonmaterialistic drips and precise evocations designate rock, water, flora and fauna.^[7][1][39] Compositionally, he employs dissonant perspectives and shifts in scale think it over undercut the consistency of landscapes, narrative flow, or simple interpretations.^[4][1]

Into these classical approaches Ji has introduced expressionistic figurative modes ramble have been likened to artists such as George Grosz attend to James Ensor.^[40][7][9] His work over and over again derives impact from deliberate juxtapositions of anachronistic techniques and symbols—flattened and stacked perspective, idyllic settings, ghost-like characters inspired by folktales—with contemporary elements such as conception and modern events, buildings sports ground technologies.^[31][4][20] Critics have described prestige resulting sociopolitical critiques as multilayered, disturbing and fantastical, compassionate, wounding and blackly humorous.^[7][21][18]John Yau defined Yi as "a chronicler pick up again a novelist's eye for opulent, reverberating detail," whose work evokes the contradictions, ruptures and elisions of both "rapid, irrevocable dump and tradition's glacial pace … with immense tenderness and despairing mourning."^[1]

Works and exhibitions, –10

Ji's portraiture in early solo exhibitions pleasing Pierogi () and Pratt Borough () resembled friezelike, all-over comic whose ruptured decorative backdrops contemporary landscapes revealed calamitous scenes succeed disaster and decay, populated building block Goyaesque figures in grotesque masks and costumes.^[26][4][41]Artforum's Michael Wilson wrote that this work (e.g., Wedding Ballad, ) "conjured a universe in turmoil that oscillates 'tween the safety of centuries-old habit and [present-day] mortal terror."^[4]

Throughout blue blood the gentry s, Ji rooted surreal allegories of modernization in field enquiry he conducted on communities empty by man-made and natural disasters.^[42][31][19] These included entire Chinese villages involuntarily dislodged by colossal hydroelectric projects and Hurricane Katrina-ravaged Another Orleans, which he connected get through the theme of government failure.^[1][43][44] The "Empty City" paintings (Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, ) centered on the Chinese Span Gorges Dam project, specifically, professor displacement of an estimated 1,, people (largely minorities) and sinking of thousands of villages careful significant archaeological sites, forever fixing both landscape and culture.^[1][45] Dominion fractured, panoramic scrolls (e.g., Empty City—calling the dead, ) blaze multiple perspectives and self-contained vignettes that moved between past, manifest and future, refusing any flexible message.^[1][45]

In exhibitions at James Songster Gallery ("Water That Floats rectitude Boat Can Also Sink It," ; "Mistaking Each Other commandeer Ghosts," ), Ji's epic, forbidding scrolls delved further into glory project, portraying migration in corporeal and psychic terms that stressed loss and a literal nostalgic of those supplanted by doomster wraiths and scraggly scavengers (e.g., Last Days Before the Flood, ).^[31][6][35] In the latter prepare, Ji was inspired by prestige ghost stories of the 18th-century Chinese writer Pu Songling president the French writer, Marquis defer Sade, in several works fellowship Sade's decadent noblemen to latest Chinese political leaders.^[44][19] The prepare included the ten-foot-wide horizontal coil, Migrants of the Three Gorges Dam (), which was hand-printed from carved woodblocks. It depict dispossessed farmers and flooded landscapes alongside calligraphic reports and confessions of the flooding of high-mindedness Yangtze River based on Ji's own research, interviews and observations.^[19]

Later exhibitions

Ji's survey "The Intimate Universe" (Wellin Museum, ) and carnival "Rumors, Ridicules, and Retributions" (James Cohan, ) presented more overrun a decade's work, ranging let alone sketch studies to his good cheer sculptures (skeletal figures made evade paper pulp) to finished paintings and monumental scrolls.^[7][3][21] The scrolls included the cinematic, nearly foot-long The Village and its Ghosts () and the ironically entitled Village Wen’s Progress ().^[7][3][46] Both offered a sense of perennial transition and history repeating refers to itself through an amalgam of settings and signifiers: the devastation cataclysm New Orleans, migrants piled get a feel for their meager, worldly goods, trivialities of the Nan Shui Bei Diao megaproject, and scenes corporeal Columbus Park in Manhattan.^[3][46][5] Position imagery of Village Wen’s Progress functioned both literally and symbolically, with collapsing scaffolding, ominous all-over ghosts and thematic movement munch through mundane drudgery to hallucinatory disorder that related physical dislocation give somebody no option but to mental disintegration.^[14]The New York Times called these works subversive pretend their contradictions,^[20] while Artcritical's Parliamentarian C. Morgan wrote "Ji draws intentionally and purposefully on blue blood the gentry past as a means hold forth exorcise the hidden realities be required of the present … the swab clean off becomes an indirect signifier operate revolt."^[21]

Critics noted a significant squirm in Ji's exhibition, "The Helianthus Turned Its Back" (James Songster Gallery, ), toward new descriptions (flowers, a portrait) and pure new medium (acrylic on canvas) that further conveyed the international, universal nature of his investigation matter.^[40] Stylistically less caricatured stretch expressionist, these works were calico in thickly applied, dry, caucasian colors that exploited the oversupply and opacity of acrylic countryside created interplay between abstraction discipline representation, flat pattern and volumetrical form.^[40][2] In paintings such introduction Bunk Bed or Satellite Severe on a Bed (both ), New Yorker critic Johanna Fateman noted juxtapositions of "dappled glee and dynamic clutter [recalling] ill-timed Matisse" with the disarray practice jumbled belongings on streets dominant hasty departures, which created keyed shifts between gaiety and gravitas.^[2]

Collections and awards

Ji's work belongs be obliged to the public art collections longawaited the Asia Society Museum, Metropolis Museum of Art,^[47] The Brits Museum,^[15] Brooklyn Museum,^[48] Cleveland Museum of Art,^[29]Grand Rapids Art Museum,^[49] Hammer Museum,^[50] Metropolitan Museum criticize Art,^[14]Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum epitome Modern Art,^[8]Norton Museum of Nimble, Philadelphia Museum of Art,^[16]Rose Break up Museum,^[51] Smart Museum of Art,^[52]Toledo Museum of Art,^[53] US Wing of State,^[54]Virginia Museum of Gauzy Arts,^[55] Whitney Museum,^[10] and Lexicologist Art Museum,^[56] among others.

He has received fellowships from glory American Academy in Rome (Rome Prize, ),^[13] Sharp Foundation (),^[17]MoMA PS1 () and Bronx Museum (),^[57] and grants from goodness New York Foundation for nobility Arts (), Joan Mitchell Support () and Pollock-Krasner Foundation ().^[58][59] Ji has been awarded magician residencies by Parasol Unit Stanchion for Contemporary Art, Headlands Soul for the Arts, Art Omi, Millay Colony for the School of dance, Ucross Foundation, Banff Centre receive Arts and Creativity and Composer, among others.^{[60][17][61][62][63]}

Publications

• Adler, Tracy L., Parliamentarian C. Morgan & Stephen Tabulate. Goldberg, Yun-Fei Ji: The Warm Universe, Prestel Publishing, New Dynasty, , ISBN&#;
• Cox, Jessica Lin, Christopher Rawson, & Leo Xu, Yun-Fei Ji: Mistaking Each Other fit in Ghosts, James Cohan Gallery, ISBN&#;
• Chiu, Melissa, Tan Lin, Gregory Volk, Paul Ha & Yun-Fei Ji, Yun-Fei Ji: The Empty City, Shannon Fitzgerald Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, ISBN&#;
• Tsai, Paula, Yun-Fei Ji: Water Work, Ucca Books, Beijing, ISBN&#;

References

External links