JIA AILI

A key figure in Chinese contemporary painting, Jia crafts expansive, dynamic compositions that engage with classic art historical modes. Challenging established visual conventions in the context of a rapidly changing world, he responds directly to the fluid nature of contemporary experience. In these canvases, natural landscapes, historical images, and abstract forms intertwine as the artist reconfigures source material from disparate periods and cultures to build a complex, layered reality that resists any singular narrative.

In the Beverly Hills exhibition, Jia deepens these ongoing investigations while introducing, for the first time, a concept he has developed and terms parallel painting, through which he liberates painting from a single flat plane by allowing painterly marks to unfold across parallel strata. Within this new body of work, points, lines, planes, geometric brushstrokes, and passages of color suggest the presence of connections within the contemporary world that are real yet mysterious and not readily perceived. Rather than conforming to a fixed spatial order, these elements overlap and shift as we view them, continually forming new relationships.

Throughout Jia’s new paintings, then, “parallel” refers not only to the spatial structure of the work, but also to an approach to pictorial construction: painting becomes an open framework within which distinct experiences coexist, forging new connections in the very moment of perception and extending Jia’s practice in a compelling new direction. In these works, the juxtaposition of images, memories, and historical experience, previously articulated within the pictorial field, extends into the spatial structure of painting itself. Visual realities of different registers and material qualities are no longer resolved into a unified order; instead, they retain a degree of separation, seeking a certain freedom within the expanded intervals between them.

The investigation of these relationships in Jia’s new work also informs its iconographic choices. The paintings draw on pictorial references associated with diverse eras and traditions—from the Thunder God of Eastern mythology to Eugène Delacroix’s The Barque of Dante (1822) and figures from The Temptation of Saint Anthony (c. 1510–15) by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch, as well as cityscapes, snowy mountain ranges, and various historical documents. In some paintings, the artist also applies abstract linear traces to transparent Plexiglas positioned in front of the painted linen. However, the simultaneity of multiple elements within individual works does not dissolve their essential differences; they retain their historical and cultural specificity even as the process of painting brings them temporarily into relation.

In Jia’s parallel painting, viewing thus becomes a continuous, active process. Image, space, and time coexist in parallel, shift out of alignment, and briefly intersect. As these relationships form and dissipate, painting reopens the possibility of perceiving multiple realities.