LOVE: AIJING SOLO EXHIBITION AT THE MARLBOROUGH GALLERY NEW YORK
Ai Jing and the Delicate Art of Sharing
"What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing. You wouldn't be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought."
David Hockney
I've been thinking a lot about experience. Ai Jing has been painting for nearly two decades but her life in art spans more than 30 years, beginning with a career in music. And yet to be a successful artist today it is not enough just to be experienced. You need drive, passion and commitment to give yourself over to the idea of living a creative life. Not many people have the stamina or the strength because to make art is to share your life with the world, to praise and support, but also to judgement, which can be harsh.
Those people who choose a creative life are often possessed of an inner strength. I saw that strength at Ai Jing's studio in Beijing where I spent time observing her work. I was really observing her, looking for signs of passion and commitment art. What I discovered was an artist who approaches making art on a daily basis as a gift to be shared with others, the gift of joy, of hope, and of beauty. The beauty and in a word, love, that flows from her paintings brings people together. In this way they are radically hopeful.
Each work is created slightly differently and yet together they make an impressively coherent statement of purpose. In fact, these paintings become more complicated and profound the more you look at them. In addition to being about hope and love, Ai Jing's gestural, glimmering, visually ebullient paintings hint at a sincere, even erudite dedication to restoring expressive painting in the art world to prominence. Ai Jing is an artist of fanciful exhibitionism but also serious intent. She is both a hippie and a revolutionary.
No surprisingly Ai Jing rejects being categorized as an artist. She studied in the studio with Zhang Xiao Gang, but does not see herself as his student. In fact asserting her own style of making art is important to her identity and confidence as an artist. It's also important to understanding her work. In the absence of narrative or figurative content these paintings must be taken on faith. If you surrender freely to them you can bask in their hope and gentle strength. Don't try to fight the sunlight, the beauty, the joy here--let the psychedelic dubs of color envelope and take you, let art make you happy, smiling, and strong.
The light and love that flows from these pictures is special and has probably emanated from Ai Jing her entire life. It is what draws people to her and to her art. People who buy and admire her paintings are those that want to stand apart and beyond fashion. They are people who admire compassion, integrity and sincerity in art-these are the hallmarks of her life and her career as a musician and now a painter. It is what draws me to her and her work along with the audaciously complicated technique she uses to make her paintings and the constant experimentation with materials, which forms and defines them.
Everywhere you look in these pictures the colors entrap you. Looking closely at Ai Jing's paintings they begin to break down into their material parts: they are once fleshy, viscous, thick with impasto, and yet light and soft, even ethereal. She uses paint, mica, and various other powders and substances picked up on her travels. Light and heavy are not the qualities that you would normally associate together in an artwork or person-this apparent contradiction is what makes her and her art special and seductive. Ai Jing's greatest virtue as a painter is her ability to impart this paradoxical feeling of weightlessness.
The conceptual challenge for Ai Jing is to create via form a connection with viewers through a distillation of ideas, thoughts and experiences. She wants to share. Sudden transient emotions and insights trigger a painting but the process of converting impulses into finished artwork requires myriad formal decisions. Color, scale, material, texture, are all important when it comes to creating a shared experience with the viewer, something Ai Jing does well. Notice how subtle variations in pictures alter feelings and mood.
Ai jing could paint the same kind of painting many times if she wanted too but each time they would be different because each time there is something different in her which motives her and determines her response to a canvas. It's the part of her works that is most difficult to grasp as a viewer and as a writer to explain and understand because it is a part of her as a person. Importantly, though, it is what allows her art to progress and evolve as she evolves over time and reacts to experiences in different ways.
You'll gain more from these paintings, as a viewer if you can set aside the fact that Ai Jing is Chinese. It simply isn't relevant to their intellectual roots and art historical ancestry, nor to their interpretation and enjoyment. Today, as I see it, there are no more Chinese or for that matter American artists, just artists living and working in China or America. Ai Jing is a New York School painter, which makes perfect sense given she first began painting seriously in New York over a decade ago. She lived in SOHO, visiting artist studios and galleries dotting the neighborhood. She made music and paintings and found a new path.
Her sensational European debut at the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan in 2015, following major exhibitions in the National Museum of China and at the Art Museum of China in Shanghai, made it clear to all that her ambitions stretched far beyond China. The artist delighted to find herself in common cause with Leonardo da Vinci, whose painting Portrait of a Musician belongs to the Ambrosiana and shows a musician holding a sheet of paper with almost illegible musical notes on it. Ai Jing took it upon herself to decipher the melody and created a machine to play this music for the first time in history. For her, sharing this experience brought people closer together across time and space.
No kind of art, for an artist as for a musician or writer or architect, is greater or I believe more urgent to the world today than that sharing and bringing people together to combat inadequacies and injustices. I think Warhol somehow managed it, as did Keith Haring and to some extent Jean Michel Basquiat. But it is a challenge, which sadly too few artists set for themselves anymore. This is nothing that should upset you or get you down-quite the contrary. Honesty can be refreshing, especially in art. Even when dark emotions interfere in Ai Jing's paintings, they are always evanescent. Her use of color is uplifting.
These works insist politely but firmly, which is in many ways an apt description of Ai Jing, that viewers engage with the groundswell of thought and feeling beneath the surface. The underlying message, we come to understand, is that nothing in our lives is quite as it seems. Tranquil and calm in manner yet bubbling inside, we are given clues as to what's happening in these paintings and are then are invited as a viewer to fill in the missing pieces, piece by piece, like clues to a puzzle.
Benjamin Genocchio
Executive Director, The Armory Show, New York
The Spiritual Tangle of Love
Upon entering the 21st century, Chinese art adopts the trends of late 20th century and moves fast forward into diversity. However, initial enthusiasm soon dies away and weariness wins over. People start to sit back and want to see what happens next. The market still causes great excitement and attracts a lot of attention. Yet our attitude toward art is quietly going through changes. We try to compare what happens overnight to what remains constant. We put more thoughts into chance and inevitability. The dignity of awe and esteem has been marginalized into a new form of popular culture or ordinary life. But people are not content. Because of their ideal or professional expectation, people still wish to put art on a pedestal in the temple of society to be worshipped and sustained, or to be put in a meaningful collection so as to become cultural tradition. Like with old masters, we wish to gain a glimpse into the complex foundation and winding path of development of their art. Through cultural links, we wish to regard these works as important addition to art. We think, we search and we let art play its appropriate role in reality.
Artists are plenty. However, one needs wisdom to stand out or even to emerge from obscurity. Ai Jing left Shenyang and entered the art circle when she was 17. The contemporary art world has always been turbulent. Whether in Beijing, New York or Tokyo, in her characteristic ways and in different forms she always expresses her thoughts and ideal and let fly her dreams. With My 1997--a song she wrote and sang--she turned the seemingly relaxed story-telling way of singing into a popular culture. It brought out what lied deep inside her and connected with an important event in mainstream ideology. My 1997 took a personal point of view when it expressed its wish for Hong Kong to revert to China. Its charm lies in its ability to address the big issue when talking about the small ones. Ai Jing's art works are all closely related to her experience. She has come a long way and her identity keeps changing. Her art is developing and she always tries hard.
As an artist, Ai Jing is full of dreams. Being a female, she is also refined and graceful. Her art is supported by love. She has chosen to work on a topic of which man never gets tired. She dives into it and expands it, changing her languages to incorporate the characteristics of our times. Her love is delicate but not abstruse. She uses the simplest of methods even when dealing with very grand events and, as a result, the effect is real and clear. Her art is conceptual yet she does not try to confuse us with abstract concepts. She has abandoned complex structural relationships and brought us back to clear thinking. Therefore she stands apart from mainstream contemporary art circle. Her thoughts went from "clothing on the back of a wanderer"-fond memory of sweaters her mother made for her, to the countless "threads in loving mother's hand" throughout time. Using love to reflect basic human ethics, she made My Mum and My Hometown, where collective consciousness is awaken and knitting by mother and other relatives is used to reflect the love of fellow human beings. Here it is unnecessary to discuss love because it is easy to understand. Love does
not need any concepts since it is straightforward and unassuming. This knitting of love might have been complicated since it required much labor. But it is easy for us to see its true meaning.
Not only is her choice of theme significant, her conceptual expression is also unique. It is about love again and this time environmental and survival issues have caught her attention. She looks painfully to a bleak future. The throwaway chopsticks are made of wood and therefore of trees from the forest. Wasting chopsticks is equivalent to killing trees and forest that could lead to destruction of environment. Ai Jing made a big tree with a height of three and a half meters, using tens of thousands of throwaway chopsticks. A black crow perching on the branches is ominous. If The Tree of Life is a knitting of concepts, then the conceptual framework behind Pieces is simpler and more straightforward, just as the board pieces themselves. But here multiple interpretations are allowed and there is more cultural content. It could allude to complex social relations, life and career arrangement, or even war strategies, all of which have starts and ends as in a game of Go. They all need to be planned, dealt with, fought and responded to. The conceptualization of art is as unpredictable as a game of Go, too. Again, Ai Jing successfully tackled a huge and complicated task in her small and simple way.
There are many ways to reach one's artistic goal. For one thing, there are many materials to choose from. Materials have never been emphasized as much as they are today. There has never been this much variety, either. As a result, we see many things that we never expected before. Ai Jing has a special sensitivity toward materials and this is another one of her characteristics. Throwaway chopsticks, yarn of old sweaters, or hand-forged copper--they all correspond to her theme and are the result of her deliberate choice and careful thinking. The importance to art expression of material is well proved here. There are many cheaper materials to use instead of copper. The 64 pieces could also be molded. But Ai Jing is persistent in her pursuit of refinement. She is not concerned with cost but the best way to achieve perfect artistic effect and psychological comfort that are in line with her concept. The choice of old or new material is also deliberate. The "new" of throwaway chopsticks is warning of problems in reality. The "old" of old sweaters and sweatpants is to remind us of love's warmth of past years. She must use this material and she will only use this material. It is how she makes her decision. Such refinement is distinct in art.
Ai Jing's love of art has determined her attitude toward art. She goes through great pains to achieve rapport between concept and material. She spares no effort when creating art works. She uses love to protect art and thus makes her contribution to contemporary Chinese art. Her art has no borders, like her love. We can always expect more from her.
Chen Lusheng
Ex-Deputy Director of National Museum of China, Researcher of National Museum of China, Art historian, Curator, Painter and Calligrapher