Yun-fei Ji: Meditations on Mountains and Moral Failures

YUN-FEI JI Four People Leaving Badong, 2009 (Detail) Watercolor and ink on Xuan paper mounted on silk 22 1/16 X 66 2/8 inches

Someone has said that the artist Yun-fei Ji wears many hats, among them those of reluctant traditionalist, ambivalent fabulist, investigative journalist, mystical storyteller. I would like to add to this already impressive list “the hat” of an environmentally concerned artist. 

His career, like his life, defies easy characterization; born in Beijing and trained at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he experienced as a student the early reforms of the 1980s before settling in New York, where he developed a complex painterly vocabulary that draws ecumenically from sources as disparate as Song-dynasty painting and socialist realism. While his formal exploration are formidable, Yun-fei Ji’s real interest might be depicting ordinary people whose lives have suddenly gone toxic due to forced evictions to give place to gigantic hydroelectric dams, and the death of the bees that once pollinated the abundant fruit trees that inspired so many artists from the "Great age of Chinese landscape" era from centuries ago.

YUN-FEI JI Four People Leaving Badong, 2009 Watercolor and ink on Xuan paper mounted on silk 22 1/16 X 66 2/8 inches

by Yung-fei Ji

With the exception of the river Nu, almost all the major rivers in China are dammed, some, two or three times. The biggest of these dams is the Three Gorges Dam, which will be completed this year [2009]. The state media regards this project as a feat of engineering and a social and economical success.

Yun-Fei Ji, The Three Gorges Dam Migration, 2009 (detail), Hand-printed watercolor woodblock mounted on paper and silk, 304.8 x 30.5 cm

Yun-Fei Ji (Chinese, born 1963), Three Gorges Dam Migration, 2009, Woodcut scroll, composition (image): 13 3/8 x 120 11/16" (34 x 306.5 cm); sheet (full sheet): 17 5/16 x 337 3/16" (44 x 856.5 cm)

However, the dam has flooded archaeological and cultural sites, displacing some 1.24 million people and causing dramatic ecological changes, including landslides and soil erosion; it is driving the already critically endangered Siberian Crane and other types of animals to near extinction. China has been one of the fastest growing economies in the world and yet its mountains are being cut up and its waters are among the worst polluted.

Three gorges dam floodwater

A man removes debris from the Yangtze River in the harbor of Wushan on June 7, 2003 in Wushan, China. Since the sluice gates of the Three Gorges Dam closed, garbage that used to float downstream became blocked in the Three Gorges region. Source: Getty Images

Edward Burtynsky, Feng Jie #3 & 4

Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, China, 2002

Landscape painting is called the "painting of mountain and rivers." People believe that mountains, being the tallest living things on Earth, are closest to heaven, and thus transmit or connect us to the higher wisdom of nature. In almost all landscape paintings, the artist /scholar is depicted in a hut, deep in the mountain, attempting to gain self-knowledge and deepen his understanding of the Tao - to find a path between the Tao of the cosmos and human society so that one day he can be helpful to it. The classical critics always say: "An inferior painting offers only a view, the better ones allow us to travel in it and the best lead us to want to live in it."

Last Days Before The Flood, 2006, mineral pigments and ink on mulberry paper, 190 x 170 cm.

Yun-Fei Ji, Three Gorges Dam Migration, 2009, (detail), Woodcut scroll, composition (image): 13 3/8 x 120 11/16" (34 x 306.5 cm); sheet (full sheet): 17 5/16 x 337 3/16" (44 x 856.5 cm)

When you study painting, you learn early on that even a simple horizontal line is made with the image of a layered horizontal cloud formation in mind. A dot should be like that of a suspended rock about to roll down the hill. There are so many interesting names attached to brush marks, like the hemp-fiber mark, the buffalo-hair mark, the drag-through-the-mud mark. The origin of every mark is always in the observation of nature. And internalising works of the past is an essential part of learning.

Yun-Fei Ji, detail from “Water Rising,” 2006, Mineral pigments and ink on mulberry paper.

Yun-Fei Ji, Water Rising (detail), 2006, Mineral pigments and ink on mulberry paper.

I grew up during the late cultural revolution in China. "Wipe the slate clean so we can build a new society" was the slogan of the day. Landscape painting, along with other "old harmful things", was in the "historical dustbin." Since then, we have become a people without memory; we value progress and profit more than wisdom. Some say that, in China, we build a city the size of Boston in a day. You can easily get lost in your own city if you have not set foot in that part of town in a few months. As the pace of development hastens, we risk losing ourselves even more, metaphysically, as we become more and more disconnected with nature and memory.

This feeling of a sense of profound loss drives me to work. My works are meditations on the mountains and waters as the image of our own moral failures. (source)

(Yun-fei Ji was born in Beijing in 1963. He is represented by James Cohan Gallery, New York.)

YUN-FEI JI Migrants of the Three Gorges Dam (Detail), 2009 Hand-printed watercolor woodblock mounted on paper and silk 15 7/8 X 123 13/16 inches

Overview of one part of the Jun-Fei Ji exhibit at The 798 Art Zone in Beijing