Lot 71
  • 71

Jia Aili

Estimate
250,000 - 350,000 GBP
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Description

  • Jia Aili
  • Serbonian Bog
  • oil on canvas
  • 169.5 by 150.5cm.; 66 3/4 by 59 1/4 in.
  • Executed in 2007.

Provenance

Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, Beijing 

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2008

Exhibited

Beijing, Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, Jia Aili: The Wasteland, 2007

Singapore, Singapore Art Museum, Seeker of Hope: Works by Jia Aili, 2012, p. 34, illustrated in colour

Condition

Colour: The colour in the printed catalogue is fairy accurate, although the overall tonality is greener in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals spots of wear to the top two corner tips. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Catalogue Note

Serbonian Bog is a supreme work – the finest example from an incisive tripartite series. In its creation of a desolate lonely landscape, in its virtuosic paint-handling, and in its implicit criticism of Chinese society, it is absolutely in keeping with the best of the artist’s output. Aili’s art exudes an overwhelming sense of duty to tackle socio-political issues: “oil painting may not be able to solve these problems, but it evokes questions and the need to scrutinise” (Jia Aili quoted in: Singapore, Singapore Art Museum, Jia Aili: Seeker of Hope, 2012, online resource). Throughout the present work, which was included in the artist’s landmark retrospective at the Singapore Art Museum, Aili confronts China’s changing attitudes to technological progress, and presents a nervous sense of foreboding about his nation’s future.

Aili was born in 1979. His generation was defined by the one child policy: raised alone, and suffocating under the weight of familial expectation. The present work is entirely in keeping with this theme in its evocation of an isolated lonely mood. A solitary figure is shown wandering through a fractal landscape; stalagmites of lurid green erupt around him, rising up almost to waist height in dank damp crests. Aili uses his mastery of the oil paint medium to imbue the work with a nightmarish mood: the composition offers no comforting linear perspective and no escape from the oppressive marshland, instead appearing flat and foggy with flecks of white paint adding to the thick heavy atmosphere. Dribbled lines of thin wet paint run down the picture plane, adding to the precipitous mood of morose despair. The scene is melancholic and hopeless, post-apocalyptic in its desperate desolation.

Aili uses this sense of monumental ruin to interrogate Chinese notions of technological progress. He has always been particularly wary of government funding of nuclear weapons. To his mind, these programmes that are supposedly examples of human technological ‘progress’, are better seen as the wanton and needless creation of warheads that could easily reduce entire continents to hollow wastelands. The present work imagines such a scene: barren, bleak and terrifyingly incomparable to our world today. The landscape is so toxic in its lurid glow that its only survivor is forced to wear a bulky baggy gas mask, just to survive.

Aili is also conscious of the power of television. Another example of technological progress, it features regularly in his work as a mesmerising all-controlling force, spell-binding in its potency. In the present work, the lonely survivor is shown clutching his television so closely he is almost absorbed by it. His devotion to the screen has become so strong he appears to have given up hope on anything, and declines to even get dressed beyond his underpants. Meanwhile, in elegiac contrast, the calligraphic figures of Chinese tradition slowly fade into obscurity in the upper right hand corner of the composition.

In its title, Serbonian Bog references the poetry of Herodotus, and relates to a perilous marsh near Lake Serbonis in Egypt. According to the classical poet, the vicious quagmire appeared as solid ground from sight, because sand had blown over its surface; even firm enough for armies to march across. They would only realise their fate when it was already too late, and thus be subsumed in the quicksand-like mud. The reference in this instance finishes Aili’s metaphor perfectly and catalyses the sense of warning. As Chinese technological progress marches blindly onwards, Aili attempts to see through the blustering billowing sands in order to present a chilling premonition of what might lie ahead.

Serbonian Bog is a devastatingly effective work. Aili employs his idiosyncratic evocation of a lonely mood to imbue his compositoin with a grave presentiment. In his virtuosic mastery of oils, and his poetic deployment of classical reference, the artist calls upon the highlights of Western art history in order to directly interrogate the socio-political issues of contemporary China.