On The Forest Trail

Graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts Lithography Department in 1999, Wei Jia was studio director Su Xinping’s favored disciple, bringing home the gold in a great number of both Chinese and international printmaking competitions. Despite his rising star in the printmaking world, Wei Jia felt that the sangfroid required during the printmaking process detracted from his passion for painting. In 2004, Wei Jia started using acrylic on canvas as his artistic material of choice, thus attaining an unimaginable zenith in his creative practice resembling the unequivocal liberation of someone who has long suffered under restrictive oppression. However, Wei Jia’s passion for painting was not in step with the times as the idea that painting was in decline gained currency in the Chinese art world during the early 2000s; even though painting was still practiced, it was mostly viewed as a tool to create an image. Very few people still longed for the purity of painting: the object of such desire resembled painting before its baptism by “contemporary art,” more ancient and eternal.  Wei Jia is one of these people. Perhaps his obsession can be traced to the first reproductions of Rembrandt paintings he saw as a child, making him realize once and for all that a painter can only realize himself by painting; only painting can con-nect the painter with the cosmos. 

In 2006, Wei Jia presented his first solo exhibition at the Star Gallery entitled An Uncivilized Spring, with biographical works including Neither Beauty nor Sadness is Worth Mentioning and Coca-Cola? especially peaking the public’s interest, while his participation in exhibitions showing artists born in the 1970’s including Next Station, Cartoon? (2005, Star Gallery, Beijing & He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen) and Naughty Kids (2006, Star Gallery, Beijing) grouped him within the movement of “New Cartoon Painting.” Compared with the political pop and cynical realism movements popular at the time, Wei Jia’s work was more in line with his actual relationship to his times, revealing a greater intimacy not only through the direct relationship between visual and narrative languages and the painter himself, but also because his work straddled the frontier between romanticism and adolescent melancholia with echoes of the urban bourgeois taste that had long disappeared in China, all proof of a hidden nostalgia for classicism. Unfortunately, Wei Jia’s appearance on the art scene was followed by the rise of “indie” painting, with the emptiness of such commercial work causing a general amnesia regarding the social and artis-tic context of Wei Jia’s practice during this early period, not allowing us to be able to fully judge his unique influence on the development of contemporary Chinese painting. 

During the beginning of his career, Wei Jia was quite successful both academically and commercially. However, he did not rest on his laurels, choosing to continually reflect upon his work up until 2007 as he still struggled with the influence of lithography on his acrylic works on canvas—would breaking free from these shackles allow him to achieve his painterly aspirations? Starting in 2008, Wei Jia’s work entered a lengthy “rebellious period,” dividing the public’s opinions, some of which questioned his intentions. This self-transformation started by breaking with the idea of “perfection,” and this process Wei Jia called “trial and error” relied on the use of dripping paint and unbridled brushstrokes to break with the integrality of his earlier work. Finding joy in this loss of control to obtain the unpredictable in painting, Wei Jia firmly believed that the physical struggle with the canvas was the most direct way to express the both concrete and subtle experience of the body and spirit. Thematically, the notion that “painters born in the 1960s were interested in ideology and painters born in 1970s were interested in self-growth” gradually lost currency with the passage of time. As the youthful melancholia of his generation eventually concluded with an abrupt and ineffable sense of ambiguity, the autobiographical quality of Wei Jia’s painting also diminished. As Wei Jia’s work’s narrativity weakened and symbolic nature increased, his brushstrokes became increasingly reckless, taking a vicious form all while an interest in vivid cosmopolitism was replaced with the somber colors of classical painting. Depicting tormented faces and ravaged landscapes, the mood of Wei Jia’s work reached all-time lows while its heaviness reached all-time highs, making his work hard to digest, so much that the usually admiring Beijing art scene started to question him. Had Wei Jia lost touch with reality, or had omnipresent consumerism made one forget that the most basic responsibility of an artist is to express the anxiety of the soul? A furious pope, a wild Monkey King, Li Bai wearing flowered socks…The World is Silent when Buddha Laughs, The Dim Light on the Opposite Shore, Existence to be Continued, Silk Ash Heap—the images and titles of Wei Jia’s work often left the viewer perplexed or despondent, as if Wei Jia was using his painting to build a wall—not to block out opposing voices but rather in a patient attempt to depict one’s interior reality by establishing distance with the outside world.

Wei Jia’s 2015 solo exhibition at Leo Xu Projects, Shanghai entitled Mildly Biting, Encountering Spring followed by his 2017 solo exhibition at the Michael Ku Gallery in Taipei entitled Sudden Brilliance marked an end to his “transition period.” His latest exhibition, On the Forest Trail at the Star Gallery, assembles a small number of new works to demonstrate the singularity of Wei Jia’s painting as he enters a period of great artistic maturity—the solid representational foundation he built during his student period finds itself integrated in his uninhibited brushstrokes. Wu Jin summarized this approach as “emptiness creating fullness, effortless and organic.” This summary was also echoed in the title of Chang Chang’s 2011 essay “Being Seems Empty, Reality Seems Hollow” The attainment of a truly original painting style for a painter is like possessing a fabulous mantle; however only a painter can understand the difficulty of the long and winding forest trail leading to such a reward. “I feel that I can paint any type of painting I want in the future, I can paint anything I want. When my will is strong enough, any image can be a part of my existence”  Wei Jia, having walked the long and winding forest trail, will surely at-tain an even broader vision in his painting, expressing his sense of existence with ever-increasing freedom.

Fang Fang

October 2017, Beijing