- 1146
JIA AILI | Good Morning, World
Estimate
2,000,000 - 3,000,000 HKD
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Description
- Good Morning, World
- oil on canvas
- 94 by 164 cm. 37 by 64½ in.
signed in Pinyin and dated 2009
Provenance
Michael Ku Gallery, Taipei
Sotheby's, Hong Kong, 6 October 2013, Lot 913
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Sotheby's, Hong Kong, 6 October 2013, Lot 913
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Exhibited
Taiwan, Taipei, Michael Ku Gallery, Jia Aili, August - September 2009, unpaginated
Catalogue Note
For me, no matter how objectively history is presented, it always conceals many secrets and deserves our excavation. The implicit significance and agendas of history are what I seek.
Jia Aili
Titled a cheery Good Morning, World, the present painting by Jia Aili depicts a statue of Lenin lying prostrate within a mysterious forest. His right arm raised in the typical communist gesture, the ethereal figure floats within a magical yet dystopian fairytale, a cryptic butterfly net fluttering against the tides of history. While the morning sun illuminates the tableaux, the scene is deathly quiet, allowing us to contemplate the ghost of Lenin and his legacy within the grand flux of time. By confronting history earnestly and without judgment, Good Morning, World is an important work by one of most notable young Chinese artists of our generation. Jia was born in 1979, in the wake of the ten-year-long Cultural Revolution as China embarked on economic reform. Although Jia is only vaguely aware of his nation’s socialist past, its ideologies from his childhood remain important influences. In particular, Jia’s grandfather was a member of the Communist Party whose bookcases were filled with books on Leninism and Marxism. “Those yellow-covered books were all over his cabinets. I read almost none of the words but looked at all the pictures, which were part of my life” (Confirmed and Unconfirmed or Unsolved Mysteries: Conversations Between Jia Aili and Feng Boyi, 2010). Elsewhere he has said: “For me, no matter how objectively history is presented, it always conceals many secrets and deserves our excavation. The implicit significance and agendas of history are what I seek” (Jia Aili: To Go From Within a Chaotic Reality--Conversations with Zhu Zhu, 2010).
Heir to the Soviet Social Realist tradition, Jia Aili received strict training in figure painting at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts. Simultaneously influenced by diverse lineages from both Eastern and Western art, Jia Aili was strongly drawn to the techniques of classical artists such as Michelangelo and Caravaggio; very early on, Jia Aili started to “emphasise the deep perspective of the picture plane and the chiaroscuro treatment of light, shadow, shape and space, creating his own theatrical approach to painting” (David Chew, ‘Portrait of a Contemporary Romantic’, in exh. cat. Singapore Art Museum, Seeker of Hope: Works by Jia Aili, 2012, p. 10). The artist himself has also declared an indebtedness to realist painters from China and beyond, stating: “When I first studied painting, I was influenced by figurative painters like Freud and Liu Xiaodong. Their kind of painting has actually always inspired me to paint in a relatively realist manner, even today. During my student years, Liu Xiaodong shook me to the core again and again with his exquisite renditions of social reality and social psychology” (Determinate and indeterminate or unsolved mysteries: Conversations between Jia Aili and Feng Boyi, 2010).
The singular lexicon of Jia Aili’s images thus derives from a complex engagement with tropes and ideas from Western art history, specifically romanticism and the pastoral landscape, combined with the reality of local subject matter. The artist is concerned with expressing existential angst on an epic universal and timeless level as well as specifically at the level of the contradictions between contemporary culture and the logic of capitalism. Jia Aili grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, a period in which China was undergoing rapid liberalisation and economic development. Unlike the earlier generation of Chinese artists, Jia Aili is less concerned with reviewing specific incidents or iconography of modern Chinese history, finding inspiration instead within narratives that are simultaneously personal and global – specifically, his resistance and scepticism towards social transformations, technological progress and a world that is increasingly connected yet also increasingly alienated and estranged. As David Chew observes, Jia Aili “sees himself as a commentator of his age, calling to mind the period of romanticism – this movement that questioned the changes and advancement of society at that time, which saw artists seeing themselves as representing the voice of their time” (Ibid., p. 11).
Jia Aili
Titled a cheery Good Morning, World, the present painting by Jia Aili depicts a statue of Lenin lying prostrate within a mysterious forest. His right arm raised in the typical communist gesture, the ethereal figure floats within a magical yet dystopian fairytale, a cryptic butterfly net fluttering against the tides of history. While the morning sun illuminates the tableaux, the scene is deathly quiet, allowing us to contemplate the ghost of Lenin and his legacy within the grand flux of time. By confronting history earnestly and without judgment, Good Morning, World is an important work by one of most notable young Chinese artists of our generation. Jia was born in 1979, in the wake of the ten-year-long Cultural Revolution as China embarked on economic reform. Although Jia is only vaguely aware of his nation’s socialist past, its ideologies from his childhood remain important influences. In particular, Jia’s grandfather was a member of the Communist Party whose bookcases were filled with books on Leninism and Marxism. “Those yellow-covered books were all over his cabinets. I read almost none of the words but looked at all the pictures, which were part of my life” (Confirmed and Unconfirmed or Unsolved Mysteries: Conversations Between Jia Aili and Feng Boyi, 2010). Elsewhere he has said: “For me, no matter how objectively history is presented, it always conceals many secrets and deserves our excavation. The implicit significance and agendas of history are what I seek” (Jia Aili: To Go From Within a Chaotic Reality--Conversations with Zhu Zhu, 2010).
Heir to the Soviet Social Realist tradition, Jia Aili received strict training in figure painting at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts. Simultaneously influenced by diverse lineages from both Eastern and Western art, Jia Aili was strongly drawn to the techniques of classical artists such as Michelangelo and Caravaggio; very early on, Jia Aili started to “emphasise the deep perspective of the picture plane and the chiaroscuro treatment of light, shadow, shape and space, creating his own theatrical approach to painting” (David Chew, ‘Portrait of a Contemporary Romantic’, in exh. cat. Singapore Art Museum, Seeker of Hope: Works by Jia Aili, 2012, p. 10). The artist himself has also declared an indebtedness to realist painters from China and beyond, stating: “When I first studied painting, I was influenced by figurative painters like Freud and Liu Xiaodong. Their kind of painting has actually always inspired me to paint in a relatively realist manner, even today. During my student years, Liu Xiaodong shook me to the core again and again with his exquisite renditions of social reality and social psychology” (Determinate and indeterminate or unsolved mysteries: Conversations between Jia Aili and Feng Boyi, 2010).
The singular lexicon of Jia Aili’s images thus derives from a complex engagement with tropes and ideas from Western art history, specifically romanticism and the pastoral landscape, combined with the reality of local subject matter. The artist is concerned with expressing existential angst on an epic universal and timeless level as well as specifically at the level of the contradictions between contemporary culture and the logic of capitalism. Jia Aili grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, a period in which China was undergoing rapid liberalisation and economic development. Unlike the earlier generation of Chinese artists, Jia Aili is less concerned with reviewing specific incidents or iconography of modern Chinese history, finding inspiration instead within narratives that are simultaneously personal and global – specifically, his resistance and scepticism towards social transformations, technological progress and a world that is increasingly connected yet also increasingly alienated and estranged. As David Chew observes, Jia Aili “sees himself as a commentator of his age, calling to mind the period of romanticism – this movement that questioned the changes and advancement of society at that time, which saw artists seeing themselves as representing the voice of their time” (Ibid., p. 11).