Leisurely Flowers in Sunset, Ink and color on paper, 68cmx35cm(4), 2020
Being the second project of “Expand + Curate: Young Experiment Project Space, Phase III”, “Animism: Everything is Alive – Jia Tianxue Solo Exhibition” was unveiled on November 14 at the Gallery 2C of the CAFA Art Museum. Featuring the mogu bird-and-flower paintings by Jia Tianxue who works at the School of Chinese Painting at CAFA, the exhibition explores the life source of bird-and-flower painting from the sample of Jia’s creative process. It reveals how real things are transformed into a spiritual image through the artist’s perception and experience, thus the non-binary thinking of man and nature can be extended from this.
Exhibition View of “Animism: Everything is Alive – Jia Tianxue Solo Exhibition”
Jia Tianxue paints in an elegant and exquisite manner, and she turns the scenes in her life into classic artistic conception with ink and wash. Her creations wander away from tradition and modernity, familiarity and unfamiliarity, usually with an elegant temperament. This is inseparable from her long-term academic training and her personal recognition of traditional aesthetics. Being sensitive to the aesthetics that surpass daily experience in ordinary things, Jia cleverly places it in the traditional context, so that they tremble a special vitality: they come from both the present and the ancient time and space. Just like a fragment in her works, the lush branches with flowers stretch out of the vintage pane.
Slight Cool, Ink and color on silk, 200cm×180cm, 2019
A Concerto of Lines, Mixed media, 240cm×120cm, 2024
Anselm Franke has borrowed the concept of “Animism” to curate an exhibition, which means “attribution of living souls to inanimate objects,” reintroduced by English anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Taylor (1832-1917), who defined it (1871) as the “theory of the universal animation of nature.” Frank challenged the traditional dichotomy of Western nature and society, inviting spectators to observe and understand the world in a new way, and re-examine the relationship among human beings, objects and nature. However, in the context of China, there are no clear dichotomy in nature and humanities, since people and the world always have a complex spiritual connection that transcends subjects and objects, ego and other, the internal and the external. Based on this, this exhibition has emphasized the creative process of gongbi bird-and-flower painting, so that visitors can not only regard paintings as images, but they may also consider them as a continuous dialogue between the artist, the spiritual world and the natural things. This artistic thinking of the universe view rooted in China reflects the unique perception of our coexistence with nature, and the paintings themselves are playing the role bridging the internal and the external, life and non-life things.
About the Exhibition
Academic Advisor: Wang Chunchen
Curators: Zhang Chen, Wang Danyun
Dates: 2024.11.14－2024.12.08
Venue: Gallery 2C, CAFA Art Museum
Courtesy of CAFA Art Museum, edited by CAFA ART INFO.
