The detail at left comes from a watercolor painting called "City of Masks". From a distance the painting looks like a mildew stain or a pattern left by drops of ink falling on the largely blank canvas (click to see a larger version). Moving closer details emerge: a tiny masked man, a truck, a building, a dog. Like much of the work by this artist the experience of viewing the painting involves moving closer, peering into the strokes to find the story hidden there.
"Objects all have different relationships to the body," says the painter Ji Yunfei during a recent studio visit as he explains why there is no consistent scale in his work.
"Small things tend to seem big if you are fascinated with them; an insect can seem bigger than a water tower," says Ji. "I use layers of ink and in some ways it looks like a city. You step back and it looks like a human cell but it also looks like a planet."
Inky Flow
Ji's paintings have the trappings and the basic layout of traditional Chinese landscape paintings or calligraphy scrolls. The architectural structure of the work has the inky flow and the fluid brush strokes of a mountain scene or a dashed off Chinese couplet.
But within the broader strokes the viewer finds hamburgers, six headed roosters, skeletons and ferris wheels. Quietly disturbing and charmingly odd viewing Ji's work is akin to seeing what appears to be a classical painting of a bowl of fruit that on closer inspection is found to be detailed with bruises and fruit flies, car batteries and elephants.
Ji Yunfei is a thirty four year old Chinese artist who lives in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. A painter and a teacher he has been in the United States for nearly fifteen years, having left Beijing in 1986 to pursue a master of the arts degree abroad. Ji was an extremely talented artist at a young age. A neighbor tutored him in calligraphy and figure drawing as a child and at fifteen he entered the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Most of his classmates were in their twenties and thirties.
Gobi Desert
"At the age of 15 he went to the equivalent of Yale," says Jonathan Goodman, a New York writer who specializes in contemporary Chinese art. "That can be a little tough to take. He was a prodigy and he was trained well but he had to grow up and mature outside of China."
Ji gained notoriety in China for the landscapes of the Gobi desert and Tibet that he drew on class trips that were reprinted in art magazines. The artwork he saw on those trips, cave paintings and buddhist scrolls, made Ji realize that art could be radically different from the socialist realist style that he had been surrounded by growing up.
"I was barely in my twenties," explains Ji. "Growing up there was only one kind of work allowed, that was socialist realism and any other kind of voice was discouraged. When I looked at the older art it seemed to speak to me more. It was more interesting. I felt connected to the things of the past."
Ji's affinity for traditional has continued since he has left China. He still creates landscapes using ink and brush and he still works on rice paper that he buys in China. His interpretation of a Chinese landscape however is entirely original and entirely his own, although he hopes it will have the same effect as the pieces by the old Song and Yuan Dynasty masters.
"They had a weird way of organizing space so that it was both grand and intimate. It seems very close to how we actually experience things. A great landscape can draw you in and you can travel in there or even live in there," says Ji.
Melancholy Spots
Ji's work echoes the Yuan Dynasty work of Qian Xuan, Ni Zan and Huang Kongwang, artists whose work is thought to be the apex of the Chinese landscape tradition. Their paintings combined compositional and technical brilliance with an underlying political message. Their depictions of flowers and lakes and lonely, melancholy spots of refuge were interpreted to express sorrow over the fall of the Song dynasty to the Mongol invaders, an invasion which ushered in the Yuan Dynasty.
Ji explains that the same undercurrents of lament are in his work. The skeletons, deformed animals and masked humans that populate his 21st century idylls suggest that there is nowhere in China today, real or imagined, that is immune from tragedy and dysfunction. Ji says that China's problem today is an insidious moral decay, a far greater danger than a Mongol invasion.
Goodman had not seen an allegorical quality to Ji's painting but ascribed the dissonance of his work to the need to modernize a traditional technique.
"There is a graphic fineness to it, a refined quality, but I think he feels the need to rough it up because otherwise it would be precious or decadent," says Goodman. "He's a pretty classically minded person but he knows that that kind of classicism can't survive in and of itself."
