Jia Aili, from 'Serbonian Bog Series' (2007)
Courtesy of the artist and Platform China (Beijing)
THE BADLANDS OF JIA AILI
At the reception, they served lamb kebabs and cheap beer in an open courtyard that smelled - eerily for those raised near the desert - of a spring without sandstorms.
The artist was down from Shenyang, the northeastern Chinese city where he lives and works. Jia Aili, 28, seems to have his head on his shoulders. He's a shy kid who smiles a lot. He's the kind of kid you would think your grandparents would like to meet when they take a walk through a Sunday morning park or that you wouldn't mind your girlfriend meeting at the gym because he seems like such a nice, well-balanced young man.
But his head spins out a fucked-up world, made all the more disturbing by its open spaces and addictive silences - like a little hatchery of newborn screams that never escape the throat.
The viewer walks in to an installation on the first floor that replicates the artist's studio. This initially seems a little too obvious to be clever. But after you see this generous selection of new work, which begin on the first floor of the space and extend up to the second floor as well, the installation takes on a private urgency.
Jia Aili worked to the 11th hour to put finishing touches on the exhibition, so the installation is the remnant of a practical necessity. But it also clearly provides a comfort zone for an artist who warms and cools slowly to new environments, so the installation effectively serves as an umbilical cord back to Jia Aili's studio in Shenyang. Workaholics like Jia Aili, painting up to 12 hours a day on oil paintings that suggest the spirit of Chinese ink-and-wash, can't stand to be far from a place to work.
The canvases themselves emit a dim uneven glow that wraps you. The most prominent element in the work is a lanky naked boy who trudges through landscapes either thick or barren, wearing what appears to be a gas mask. In the series 'Serbonian Bog,' the masked boy wades at night through a knee-deep swamp full of water lilies and murky water. The canvases are large enough (on the average around 2.5 by 4 meters) to embrace the viewer.
The boy's reappearance serves to accumulate meaning like the lullaby you never wanted to hear your mother sing. The canvases - through Jia Aili's exact studies of mood - gradually take on the steady, murmuring rhythm of a somnabulist. We never sense that this is a real swamp, although in terms of detail it is sufficiently realistic. Wave after wave, we sense the boy in the picture is an allegory for the self, or the struggle for a free self, whether the artist's or our own.
The richness of these paintings do not enclose us because the landscape is always lush (there are desert scenes here as well). But that richness is woven by variations on a theme. The same boy never steps into the same bog twice. Sometimes he is empty-handed. More often than not, he is salvaging something. He reads a book in one piece from the series; in another he hauls a TV set. The darkness that encloses the bog and the boy also varies from work to work. Sometimes it is pitch-black. Sometimes it gives birth to gossamer-thin calligraphy, and sometimes it cascades and meshes with the green of the foliage so that we sense we are looking through a veil.
All these slight adjustments suggest a form of meditation where the self is permitted to fester in anxiety until it blooms and understands the nature of its own beautiful disease. In one painting from 'Serbonian Bog', a flower blooms in the darkness under the drooping leaves. For all the contemporary energy of this work, the 'flower in the swamp' is interwoven with classical Chinese paradoxes - concentration yields a burst of enlightenment until desolation turns fertile; emptiness breeds fullness; out of the mud comes a flower. One of the most provocative questions these paintings ask is whether or not Jia Aili's plunge is willful or unwanted.
The Wasteland' (2007)
267cm x 200cm
oil on canvas
Such paradoxes that lead to that question are not exclusive to China. At the risk of totalizing, Western viewers can still find precedent in T.S. Eliot ('in my end is my beginning).' The English-language title for the show, 'The Waste Land', begs unwittingly for a comparison to Eliot. It is hard to imagine that the interests and sensitivities of a 21st-century Chinese artist could have much in common with a dead white male. It is hard to imagine Eliot eating lamb kebabs in Beijing.
'The Wasteland' still might be as close as we can come to a reasonable translation of the show's Chinese title. That's not because the title is exceptionally poetic. It's because the word doesn't exist in Chinese. Jia Aili coined his title for the show by joining two characters, 'feng' suggesting mental illness and 'jing' meaning landscape. The artist has created, in effect, what he calls 'a landscape of insanity.'
But honestly, this is not the type of insanity that disturbs on a gut level. This is a sweet-n-sad insanity that reads less like psychosis and more like melancholy - it's a felt sadness, but in the end it is too controlled and stylized to be threatening. What we are faced with instead is a well-executed confession from the self to the self for the sake of the self. It's a fertile neurosis. The naked kid in the bog never becomes a freak in a horror film; he meets no mythological demons, either. He does not hallucinate or melt down to become the visions that plague prophets and psychos. The mind stays intact, both agitated and focused, and slightly unnerved.
The impact of the work stems from how in step Jia Aili is with his generation even though he resists the temptation to lose himself fully in its cadence. His sense of isolation rings true to his age group. Many young artists born the late 1970s, commonly referred to as the Post-70s Generation, are reacting en force to the materialistic, consumerist explosion of an open market. But rather than make critical commentary through their work, they seem to be either absorbing the excesses of consumerism gladly or escaping into the realms of a neurosis where they feel isolated from Chinese society: like Beats who don't want little pink houses. The Post-70s Gen ultimately flaunt a lack of values, but the nihilism exhibited in the work often lacks philosophical depth: the despair feels like an adolescent pose. Older artists who lived through the Cultural Revolution have the benefit of real-life struggles; many younger artists have to imagine them.
Jia Aili shows a similar sensitivity in works like 'Uncomfortable' from 2005. Here the masked boy still has his pants on as he stands inside a room before a pile of junk. But the boy's got his hands in his pants, reaching for his crotch. It's a finely executed piece that suggests the auto-erotic without ever indulging our suspicions. It also has all the ingredients of Post-70s Chinese art: isolated youth, a destructive environment, sexual exploration, a feel-good nihilism that never matures into the real thing.
But ultimately, Jia Aili is not trying to shock. Work like 'Father' (2006), which he made while still at the Academy, bears all the weight of Socialist-Realist art, betraying the substantial impact that Soviet training has had on Chinese art schools since the 1950s. After the late 1970s when art academies were reopened after the Cultural Revolution - and certainly by the mid-1980s and the birth of China's 1985 New Wave Movement - many Chinese artists were throwing off their Socialist-Realist influences for a brave new world inhabited by Duchamp, Warhol and even Gilbert and George. But Socialist Realism still tinges academy training and remains appropriate for the harshness of a cold northern industrial city like Shenyang.
'Father' is rather conservative, rather academic. The piece portrays a simple, tired man on a barren landscape and feels like work for the proletariat, not the individualist; it is a received formula (albeit well-executed), not an extension of the self. 'Father' is tender, but lacks confidence and dramatic tension.
But eventually, the father figure evolves into the masked child. The father figure, who also wears a pair of either long underwear or pants, becomes a young man who wears a pair of white pants. The old, tired face is exchanged for a mask. The wrinkled body becomes smooth and acquires a new sensuality. Jia Aili's landscapes also gain new force in works like 'February Talk - Past (Bed)' from 2006. The triptych features a bed, both mattress and frame, burning on a barren landscape. The landscape perfectly evokes the quality of northeast China's terrain: the sky is a dirty blue and the ground is covered with stubble. The burning bed finally provides pictorial tension and breaks up an otherwise flat scene.
'Nameless Day 1' (2007)
169 x 150cm, oil on canvas
That tension unfurls into sexual fantasy in works like 'February Talk - Sea' (2006). The masked boy here crouches between the legs of a lover on a polluted beach. The boy, however, usually prefers to wander alone. In a series called 'Nameless Day' he sits nude, but masked, on a desert landscape while a rocket shoots into the sky. Here all the elements of Jia Aili's training come into play: an almost sensual exploration of solitude, a cartoonish concern true to Post-70's artists (the mask occasionally suggests a comic superhero), the graininess of the Northern Chinese landscape, and even the markings of Socialist-Realist training that he received in the Academy.
But however much we dissect the whole, the power in these pieces is that there is an unstoppable sad energy that guides us through his private drama, scene by scene, and that never relinquishes its quietest, final secret. The protagonist of this dirty theatre - the masked boy - wanders through a salvage yard of refrigerators ('The Wasteland', 2007), he beds himself down before derelict factories ('Depressed Man, 2006), and finally enters a Serbonian bog. He is, and we are, perpetually guided by a sad mystery. This is about as swampy and about as good as it's ever going to get.
Stacey Duff
Jia Aili
Until 10 June
Platform China
No. 319-1 East End Art (A)
CaoChangDi Village, Chaoyang District
Beijing
T: +86 (0)10 6432 0196
www.platformchina.org
Stacey Duff has an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University (US) and has lived in Beijing since 2003, where he is a regular contributor to ArtZineChina. He is also a poet, having previously published in magazines like Conjunctions, Skanky Possum and Octopus, and forthcoming work will appear soon in the new San Francisco magazine, Canteen. Since 2005, he has reported extensively on Chinese contemporary art as the art editor for TimeOut Beijing.
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