A pioneer of Chinese video art, Zhu Jia examines ideas surrounding the ordinary in our rapidly changing, contemporary society.
Read MoreZhu Jia's videos revolve around ordinary actions, sites, and narratives, rendering them unfamiliar through repetition or experimentation with camera placement to address our perceptions of reality.
Zhu initially studied painting, graduating with a degree in oil painting from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing in 1988. When he began experimenting with a video camera in the early 1990s, the medium had yet to come into being as an art form in China.
Zhu is now credited as one of the first Chinese artists to work with video, his fellow pioneers including Zhang Peili, with whom he exhibited together in Not Only Time: Zhang Peili and Zhu Jia at Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, Los Angeles in 2010.
One of Zhu's most iconic works, Forever (1994) shows a rotating impression of the city of Beijing. Filmed by fixing a camera onto the wheel of a tricycle, which the artist then took out to the streets, the video constantly changes perspective and disrupts our relationship with visual experience.
Actions that are seemingly without beginning or end are a regular occurrence in Zhu's work. In Repeat on purpose (1997), a camera placed inside a refrigerator captures its door repeatedly opening and closing, while a Boeing 747 aeroplane is looped taxiing on the runway in Never Take Off (2002). Time, normally understood to flow in a linear fashion, becomes unpredictable in Zhu's videos.
Zhu explores aspects of reality through paintings in 'The Face of Facebook' (2011–2012), for which he asked his friends and acquaintances to recreate the portrait of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that appeared in The New Yorker in 2010. Participants, including contemporary Chinese artists Liu Xiaodong, Yang Fudong, and Sun Xun, among others, produced portraits in different mediums—painting, drawing, ink, and even calligraphy—echoing the anonymity, blurring of fiction and reality, and proliferation of images that have become endemic to social media.
Zhu continues to engage with the ordinary in his work, often drawing from his own experiences. The video Waltz (2013), based on the story of his parents, also inevitably reflects the history of the Cultural Revolution in China.
In 2020, in his solo exhibition Recent Paintings at ShanghART in Shanghai, Zhu presented large-scale paintings of leisure made while he was living abroad. Large portions of the canvas are left blank in works such as Hello London-2 and Scenery near Bilbao(2018), perhaps suggesting the fleeting nature of their respective moment. The central fountain in Spray Fountain (2020), caught in the midst of action, is a picture inside a picture that disrupts the otherwise smooth surface of the painting.
In addition to participating in major international exhibitions in the 1990s and early 2000s, among them Cities on the Move (1997–1999) and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), Zhu Jia continues to show his works in solo and group presentations.
Solo exhibitions include Faraway Friends, Modern Art Base, Shanghai (2020); Critical Pervasion, ShanghART, Shanghai (2016); FAB-Union Space, West Bund Culture and Art Pilot Zone, Shanghai (2015).
Group exhibitions include Refocusing on the Medium, Minsheng Art Museum, Beijing (2022); Shifting Times, Moving Images, ShanghART, Singapore (2021).
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2022
