Yun-Fei Ji

Why this artist matters now

Yun-Fei Ji is a Chinese-American painter who lives in New York City and Philadelphia. His art synthesizes old and new representational modes, subverting the classical idealism of centuries-old Chinese scroll and landscape painting traditions to tell contemporary stories of survival amid ecological and social disruption. He employs metaphor, symbolic allusion and devices such as caricature and the grotesque to create tumultuous, Kafka-esque worlds that writers suggest address two cultural revolutions: the first, Communist one and its spiritual repercussions, and a broader capitalist one driven by industrialization and its effects, both in China and the U.S. ARTnews critic Lilly Wei wrote, "Ancestral ghosts and skeletons appear frequently in Ji’s iconography; his work is infused with the supernatural and the folkloric as well as the documentary as he records with fierce, focused intensity the displacement and forced relocation of people, the disappearance of villages, and the environmental upheavals of massive projects like the controversial Three Gorges Dam."

Source: Artsy · Trust score: 85% · Updated 1mo ago