Jia Aili' s Hibernation <3>

My first article ever published in a art catalogue, for a group show "Looking for Me", curated by Fangfang at Shanghai Minsheng Art Centre this September. I wrote the part for Jia Aili within 500 Chinese characters.

If it’s true that an artist’s technique is developed later in life, then his disposition is surely innate. When the heavens endowed Jia Aili with his artist temperament, they also gave him an incredibly sensitive fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae. As a student in sketch class, one day their subject was a ball of wrinkled newspaper. Jia Aili was the first to finish, but looking closely, it becomes clear that he altered the newspaper’s headlines to read a dense jumble of: “Never Forget Painting Master Jia.” At that moment, Jia Aili’s talent and ambition of art has already outstanded from his peers.

Untitled 40x40cm Oil on Canvas 2008

Critics like to use words like “depressed” in describing Jia Aili and his art works. He is depressed in his heart, but never lack of adherent or adorer at his side. More care and attention might the other way round intensify his torment inward about creation and himself. When he was a student in Luxun Academy of Fine Arts, Aili often worked on a canvas at the corridor of the students building, drawing a crowd of fascinated onlookers every time. And he has been taking it easy while now his studio in Beijing also frequented by curators, critics, artists or art enthusiasts.

It's not only you who is pale, Oil on Canvas, 300x600cm 2007 Jia Aili2

The Wasteland 286x400cm Oil on Canvas 2007

Facing the canvas, he is lonely, and longs to close the distance between him and his surroundings, but he always stops before going too far，in case any close touch to his sensitive heart or unintentional hurt.

Untitled 296x400cm Oil on Canvas 2007-2008

The Wasteland 286x400cm Oil on Canvas 2007

The most common recurring element in Jia Aili’s paintings is a man in the gas mask; he consistently fills his enormous paintings with an expansive wasteland that seems to swallow up everything. Adding words such as “wizen,” “pale,” or “waste” to his landscapes of ruin, skeletons of planes, or waning lotus ponds, thoroughly diffuse the solitude and inhibition of Jia Aili’s works. The occasional appearance of beds, the seascape or his father bear the weight of inescapable innermost feelings and a sorrow that he will never reveal to others.

残败的不只是你 170x175cm 布面油画2006

《无名日2》200cmx267cm Oil on canvas 2007

Untitled, 200x232cm, oil on canvas, 2008

A smoking bed, a burning car, and a smoldering open field…. What is burning? And what is transpiring with the smoke? Gazing at these dimly discernable coils of black smoke, is one’s heart liberated, at peace? Or is it even more entangled in nervousness, entrenched in suffering?

The Wasteand, 232x200 Oil on canvas 2008

二月物语-过去(床)-300cmX500cm-2006

In warm-colored works In the Fields of Hope and Be Ready at Any Time, the plaster busts donning gas masks in his paintings finally explode and collapse. Yet amidst his ceaseless self-negation, Jia Aili seems to have discovered the thoroughfares to self-discovery.

On the field of hopes 164x265cm oil on canvas 2007

The Wasteland 110x300cm Oil on canvas 2008

Image rights reserved to the artist and associated galleries.