Jia Aili

Private Asian Collection
Acquired by the present owner from the above

China, Shenzhen, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Jia Aili, Good Morning World!, 3 July to 15 August, 2010
China, Beijing, Pin Gallery, BAD Exhibition, 29 April to 30 June, 2011
Singapore, Singapore Art Museum, Seeker of Hope: Works by Jia Aili, 6 July to 23 September, 2012, pp. 72-73

Spin: The First Decade of the New Century, Today Art Muuseum, Beijing, China, 2012, pp. 48-49
Yishu Zhongguo Niandu Yishujia 5 Jia Aili, Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, Chengdu, 2012, pp. 62-63

This work is generally in good condition. Having examined the work under ultraviolet light, there appears to be no evidence of restoration.
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A Parable of Times Gone By
Jia Aili

Good Morning, World was the centrepiece of young artist Jia Aili’s eponymous large-scale solo show of 2010. A triptych of oil paintings, it measures over 10 metres in length—second only to Our Century, which measures over 15 metres. Good Morning, World has been exhibited many times and is a major representative of Jia’s practice. Embodying his concern for historical images, memory, and iconography, it was his first attempt at the triptych and a departure from conventional formats. The left panel pictures Yuri Gagarin, the first Soviet astronaut, in a helmet. The right panel features Young Pioneers reading in a small house, next to a landing ship. The middle panel features a field of grey, at once distancing and drawing together the two side panels, which seem unrelated at first but are in fact dialectically bound in a subtle, inchoate manner to generate a tension-filled fable-like ensemble. This method is not unlike that of Andy Warhol, who juxtaposed photos from the media to allow for his audience to reevaluate their inter-relatedness. Good Morning, World (Lot 1043) is infused with Jia Aili’s signature stylistic and thematic elements: trepidation about the coming of a new age, nostalgia for an old one, and a romantic view of the one drawing to an end. At the same time, Good Morning, World has had a tremendous influence over his subsequent work. The space helmet seen here, replacing the masks of his earlier works, has become one of his most frequent subjects. The theme of space travel and the Red Scarfs seen on the right panel have likewise recurred in his later works. Marking an important transition and a new beginning in Jia’s creative practice, Good Morning, World is of tremendous art-historical significance.

Born in 1979, Jia Aili has doubtlessly become one of the most renowned young contemporary Chinese artists, his work embodying the mentality of a whole generation born after the Cultural Revolution. With his vividly imaginative compositions and virtuosic painting techniques, he has forged a new space for contemporary Chinese art and influenced many subsequent young artists. Commenting on Jia’s show at the Singapore Art Museum, the prominent critic Karen Smith writes that “Jia Aili’s works have not only been successful, but also recognised as an essential force in transforming the new generation of Chinese painters.”¹ Dating from 2010, Good Morning, World opened a completely new set of creative dimensions after the desolate imagery of ruins, masks, and rapid brushwork in the artist’s early Wasteland series.

In contrast to artists who came of age during the Cultural Revolution, Jia Aili was born in 1979 and grew up in the 80s and 90s. In this period, collectivist communism vanished under China’s liberalisation, leaving little behind but old portraits of Party leaders. It was difficult to keep pace with China’s rapid economic development. Unlike the earlier generation of artists, Jia Aili is uninterested in reviewing the traumas of modern Chinese history, and instead finds inspiration within himself, by exploring the purpose of individual existence. With his robust and even explosive brushwork, and in his fantastical scenes of apocalyptic ruin, he draws a psychological portrait of a young generation and shows the new horizons of contemporary Chinese art. In fact, Jia is similar to some Western artists who hail from post-Socialist countries, such as the East German-born Neo Rauch and the Romanian Adrian Ghenie, in that they all work with familiar iconographies of the past. Although they live in different social contexts, they all possess a unique sense of history and provide unique perspectives on the past. Dandong, Jia Aili’s hometown in Liaoning Province, recurs as a theme and a stage in Jia’s work because it is a point of contact between him and history. Separated from North Korea by the Yalu river, Dandong borders past (North Korea) and present (China). Consciously or not, Jia uses his memory of Dandong to convey his thoughts on China’s past and present and thereby grasp the shape of time and reflect his perspective on history. “For me, a work of historiography, no matter how objective, always hides many secrets and invites my exploration. What it implies is precisely the hidden themes that I want to pursue.”² The subtext of Good Morning, World is like a visual fable: it contains the images of the past but also unprecedented methods of expression. As we excavate its inherent meanings, we find even more questions, but also more inspiration. Gagarin and the Young Pioneers both represent a past age. Are the Young Pioneers studying Soviet space technology because they want to travel to another planet? The field of grey seems to thwart their aspiration. Is the artist satirising humans’ drive to conquer the world? In any case, Wu Wei, curator of “Good Morning, World,” writes, “Jia Aili uses a new form, between narrative and non-narrative, to redefine painting. He also attempts to find spatio-temporal relationships in a world composed of events, memories, and images, as well as a kind of existential logic for all things.”³

This logic has recurred in different guises in Jia Aili’s later creations, which have also turned away from the expressive pathos of his early works and towards an introspective dialecticism. Space travel has also featured repeatedly in his works, such as the flying saucer seen in Untitled. Gagarin has likewise served as the subjects in at least three Untitled paintings. The vast majority of the human figures Jia has painted after Good Morning, World have been Red Scarfs, who seem to represent a search for personal and even national memory.

Although Good Morning, World is different from Jia Aili’s past works in subject matter, it is consistent with them in its classicising aesthetics. In fact, he graduated in 2004 from the oil painting department of the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts. An inheritor of the Academy’s tradition of Soviet social realism, Jia underwent rigorous training in figural painting. Although a virtuosic oil painter, he refrains from showing off his technique, but has rather worked towards generating a sense of epic tragedy on his canvases. In 2008, he began the enormous We Are from the Century, which measures 15 metres in length and 6 metres in height and has the compelling and absorbing presence of Italian Renaissance murals. Indeed, Jia Aili has never concealed his passion for classical Western art. He has said that if he lived in the past, he probably would want to be a muralist. Jia’s works are infused with the spirit of Renaissance paintings; they possess Rembrandt’s and Leonardo’s sensitivity towards chiaroscuro, the world-saving magnanimity of religious paintings, as well as a profound sense of tragedy. Good Morning, World embodies precisely this aesthetic ideal. In its accurate rendition of figures and perspective, the lofty spiritualism, and the triptych format, Good Morning, World strongly recalls the European tradition of religious painting. Jia hopes that his works, just as Michelangelo’s did several centuries ago, will inspire and touch viewers, and that his fable will serve as a reference to the current age for future generations.

Karen Smith believes that Jia’s works “articulate a vision of the world that encompasses everything from the universe to specks of dust,” with Shakespearean grandeur and sensitivity. Indeed, although born long after Shakespeare’s time, Jia Aili has created a record this era of interpersonal isolation in painting. Without excessive political and social consciousness, his works veer towards the private and the secretive, and his emotional expression is restrained and calm, perhaps even cruel. These stylistic characteristics are echoes of the individualistic age in which we live. If art is a mirror of life, then Jia Aili’s paintings indeed reflect the vanities and insecurities of contemporary China, and bear eloquent witness to an entire people’s experience of these times.

 

1 “Jia Aili: Seeker of Hope,” New York Times website, August 17, 2012.
2 “Jia Aili: Towards a Chaotic Reality—In Dialogue with Zhu Zhu,” 2010.
3 Good Morning, World!, Wu Wei, 2010.