Ai Jing Waxes Nostalgic for Chinese Farms and Factories

The multi-hyphenate artist feels more alienated by China today than during earlier—in some ways tougher—phases in the country's development.

Ai Jing's exhibition All the World is Green 2019–2023 opened this week at Helen J Gallery in Los Angeles. It takes its title from the eponymous Tom Waits song in which the singer asks his wife to pretend the world is as it was.

Artist Ai Jing rose to fame with her own melancholy love song 'My 1997' (1993), in which she looked not backwards but forwards, hoping to usher in the future so she could pursue her singing career in Hong Kong and reconnect with a lover in the city after it was reunified with China.

These days, Ai Jing feels more connected to the past than the present.

'In my childhood, life was hard, especially for the working class, but I was outside every day, catching insects. I looked at the blue sky instead of a screen and I played in the forest instead of a mall,' she told Ocula.

Ai's art practice, which includes paintings and sculptures, is deeply felt, earnest, even innocent. It's an emotional mode she's seeking to protect through her work.

Girl and Swing (2018), a hyperrealistic sculpture, modelled in clay and then scaled up and cast in beeswax, recreates a moment captured in a photograph when the artist was a child. Young Ai Jing's head—topped with a watermelon haircut, the Chinese equivalent of a bowl cut—is thrown back, laughing with joy.

In her 'I Love Colour' series, the word 'love' (爱 in Chinese, a homonym for her surname) repeats across the canvas.

The act of expressing love became more urgent during the pandemic, which Ai described as a period of introspection.

'I believe we are all small in the universe, nothing against a virus, or technology, or development, or transformation. But art has power because it allows you to feel something, and to reach for something.'

Ai felt a deep connection to works by Mark Rothko, who she sees as similar to an Asian artist—more spiritual in his approach, using oil paint as if it were ink or watercolour. She became obsessed, experimenting with blocks of colour over the 'love' motif in the series 'Mr. R'.

Several of the newer works in the 'I Love Colour' series, though, draw more inspiration from nature. We see the word 'love' appear to grow from the canvas like grass or crops that she encountered growing up in Shenyang, in China's northeast. Another series, 'Flow', fixes real tree branches to coloured pencil on paper colour field drawings.

While she feels a deep connection to nature, Ai is also nostalgic for China's early industrial boom, when often gruelling jobs at state-owned factories nevertheless provided a level of financial security for workers and their families. These factories closed down, as documented in Wang Bing's film Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002), when China embraced the free market.

Incomes have risen further in China in the decades since, but so has a consumerism that is often blamed for disconnecting people from nature, family, and deeper meaning in their lives.

'When I was a child, my grandmother made the soles of the shoes I wore by stitching together pieces of old fabric and sticking them in place with a glue made from flour,' Ai said. 'I looked forward eagerly to wearing new shoes, but the patchwork of these old fabrics remains a vivid memory from my childhood.'

Ai Jing: All the World is Green continues at Helen J Gallery through 16 April 2024. —[O]