Part historical painter and part documentarian, Yun-Fei Ji is a storyteller who takes past events and lives of ordinary people as the subjects of his paintings. Accounts of displacement, natural disasters and corrupt power in the villages are turned into semi-fictional narratives in his works.

Yun-Fei Ji was born in Beijing (°1963) and moved at a young age to America, where he currently lives and works, in Columbus, Ohio. Ji draws on handmade rice paper using remarkable traditional Chinese techniques, and narrates the historic and present-day situation of China. The new series of drawings on view tell the story of an ancient Chinese village that was destroyed because of pollution and the grandstanding operations of the government.

Yun-Fei Ji belongs to a generation of artists educated in the official state style of Socialist Realism. Traditional techniques are used to illustrate the dogmatic propaganda of the Cultural Revolution. After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, a Chinese avant-garde movement arose that actively reacted against the traditional imagery of Socialist Realism. Inspired by this movement Yun-Fei Ji started using oil rather than ink. In the late 1980s he moved to America and travelled throughout Europe; it is here that he discovered Western tradition and contemporary art. This turned out to be of great influence for the artist’s work.

It proved to be a hard decision for Ji to eventually return to traditional techniques. It would have felt more coherent to continue in oil paint, which clearly brought his critical voice to the fore, whereas his personal and political message, now translated in soft pastel and ink drawings, became more diluted. Moreover, the traditional technique is time consuming and demands a lot of patience and skill.

In the past Yun-Fei Ji has made other series of works that were critical of Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’-campaign. New scientific methods of fertilization, the adaptation of modern technologies and forced collective farming promised the liberation of the Chinese farmers and an abundance of crops. The reality turned out quite different, with thirty million deaths and the biggest famine in human history. Another series narrates the construction of enormous dams and the often disastrous consequences for the surrounding people, environment and agriculture. Yun-Fei Ji shows us a country in transition and a painful process of urbanization and industrialization.

The works that are currently on view at the gallery tell a similar chronicle. Yun-Fei Ji decribes the story as follows:

“Trying to escape the heavy surrounding smog and the crowded noisy life of the city, I would often go deep into the mountains to a village to live for a period of time whenever I could. Many years later, this village has become my daily longing and comfort. Every time when there is unpleasant or stressful situations, the only thing I need to do is close my eyes and see myself in this village and very soon my mood will improve. The people in this village are the toughest people I have ever met. Even during the Great Famine of the 1960s, most of these people survived. Yet, the last few years they had unprecedented difficulties with developers and the village officials sold land from the people. The villagers petitioned. All along the river the water is getting worse and more polluted, and the wells are contaminated. I never expected this little village, which survived for hundreds of years, to be like the thousands of other villages in China; disappeared overnight.”

Next year, Yun-Fei Ji will have solo shows at the Wellin Museum of Art in Clinton (US) and the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland (US).

Yun-Fei Ji took part in the Whitney Biennale in New York in 2001. ‘The Old One Hundred Names’ at Zeno X Gallery in 2003 was Yun-Fei Ji’s first European exhibition and was successfully adopted by the Pratt Institute in New York. The solo exhibition ‘The Empty City’ opened at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis and travelled further to The Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University in Waltham and the Richard E. Peeler Art Center in Greencastle. Solo exhibitions dedicated to his work were organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, UMCA in Amherst, Krannert Art Museum in Illinois and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

His work has featured in group exhibitions such as the New Orleans Biennial, Sydney Biennial, Lyon Biennial, Mercosur Biennial and at The Drawing Center in New York, British Museum in London, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Vancouver Art Gallery in Vancouver, S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Menshikov Palace at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, FRAC de Picardie in Amiens and MoMA in New York, amongst others.

Yun-Fei Ji’s work is part of public collections such as MoMA in New York, Hammer Museum in LA, New Museum in New York, Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and others.