YUN-FEI JI

Ji is inspired by the ghost stories that he first learned growing up in the countryside during the late Chinese Cultural Revolution. He employs the stacked perspective and flattened space of classical Chinese painting to tell contemporary stories that, while geographically specific, speak to a collective human experience. The work often comments on political realities of both US and China, expressed in codes by using metaphor and allusion. There is a satirical streak, and his love of the grotesque is balanced with humour and a deep sense of irony. Each work is an act of resistance, insisting that narratives of displacement and environmental destruction are worth preserving.

In monumental scrolls like Village Wen’s Progress, 2017 and After the First Seventh Day, 2016, Ji’s compositions are populated by individualised, contemporary figures that inhabit a landscape in perpetual transition. Suspended between modernity and tradition, the village becomes a metaphor for community. The ghosts of ancestors and animal-like folkloric figures that intermingle with these present-day villagers act as potent reminders of the time-honoured cultural traditions endangered by this march towards “progress.” Although these scrolls are read from right to left, the narrative can be entered at any point, emphasising a continuum of past, present, and future.

Text courtesy James Cohan Gallery