Yun-Fei Ji: The East Wind

May 1-August 1, 2004

 
Yun-Fei Ji
Dinner at the Forbidden City, 2001, Ink and mineral pigment on mulberry paper, 54 x 67 inches, Courtesy Pierogi Gallery, NY
 

The ICA is pleased to present new work by Brooklyn-based Chinese artist Yun-Fei Ji. Yun-Fei Ji uses traditional techniques of Chinese painting to confront much more contemporary issues in these large, scroll-like works on paper. The idea of the implicit, the veiled and the metaphorical have strong political resonance in China, where reading between the lines is its own form of art. Seductive ink and pigment-stained landscapes detail a turbulent history of China over the past hundred years. Mythological characters double for party apparatchiks and businessmen. These drawings contrast old and new China with their swirling lines, layered smudges, and sharp detail.


Yun-Fei Ji
The Boxer, the Missionary, and Their Gods, 2002, Alum and mineral pigment on mulberry paper, 48.5 x 63.5 inches, Courtesy Pierogi Gallery, NY
 

Recent work have dealt with issues including the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, and the environmental impact of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River region, scheduled for completion in 2009. Shannon Fitzgerald, curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, describes Yun-Fei Ji's work, "From a distance, Ji's traditional brush paintings seem to hearken back to the atmospheric landscapes of the Sung Dynasty painters, but viewers who approach the work closely are quickly brought through time as his mists, waterways, mountains, architecture, and people reveal toxic clouds, boiling polluted waters, dangerous craggy mountains, fallen modernist buildings and scavengers and ghosts."

 
Yun-Fei Ji
The Move in Ba Don (detail), 2002, Aluminum and mineral pigment on mulberry paper, 48.75 x 38 inches, Courtesy Pierogi Gallery, NY
 

Yun-Fei Ji was included in the Whitney Biennial 2002 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and has exhibited at The Pratt Manhattan Gallery and the Drawing Center in New York City and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut, in addition to others. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Sharpe Foundation and the Pollack-Krasner Foundation.




Installation Views. Photos by Aaron Igler.

ICA acknowledges the generous support of the Buddy Taub Foundation. Additional funding has been provided by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The Dietrich Foundation Inc., the Overseers Board for the Institute of Contemporary Art, friends and members of ICA, and the University of Pennsylvania. (Information complete as of 4/16/04.)


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