Yun-Fei Ji (; born 1963) is a Chinese-American painter who lives in New York City and Philadelphia.Yau, John. "Alone and Together on The Stage of The World," The Brooklyn Rail, June 2004. Retrieved May 19, 2023.Fateman, Johanna. "Yun-Fei Ji," The New Yorker, January 2023. Retrieved May 22, 2023. His art synthesizes old and new representational modes, subverting the classical idealism of centuries-old Chinese scroll and landscape painting traditions to tell contemporary stories of survival amid ecological and social disruption.Shen, Danni. "Yun-Fei Ji's Ghost Stories of the Living," Hyperallergic, June 29, 2016. Retrieved May 19, 2023.Wilson, Michael. "Yun-Fei Ji, Pratt Manhattan Gallery," Artforum, May 2003, p. 171. Retrieved May 22, 2023. He employs metaphor, symbolic allusion and devices such as caricature and the grotesque to create tumultuous, Kafka-esque worlds that writers suggest address two cultural revolutions: the first, Communist one and its spiritual repercussions, and a broader capitalist one driven by industrialization and its effects, both in China and the U.S.Yau, John. "An Artist Conjures the Ghosts of Displacement," Hyperallergic, May 12, 2018. Retrieved May 19, 2023.La Rocco, Ben. "Yun-Fei Ji: mistaking each other for ghosts," The Brooklyn Rail, April 2, 2010. Retrieved May 19, 2023. ARTnews critic Lilly Wei wrote, "Ancestral ghosts and skeletons appear frequently in Ji’s iconography; his work is infused with the supernatural and the folkloric as well as the documentary as he records with fierce, focused intensity the displacement and forced relocation of people, the disappearance of villages, and the environmental upheavals of massive projects like the controversial Three Gorges Dam."Wei, Lilly. Wei, Lilly. "Ghostly Tales: Yun-Fei Ji at Wellin Museum, Clinton, NY," ARTnews, April 29, 2016. Retrieved May 19, 2023.
Institutions that Ji has exhibited in included the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), S.M.A.K. (Ghent),S.M.A.K. "Hareng Saur: Ensor and Contemporary Art," Exhibitions. Retrieved May 22, 2023. the Whitney Museum,Whitney Museum of American Art. Yun-Fei Ji, Artists. Retrieved May 22, 2023. Brooklyn Museum and New Museum,The New Museum. "New Additions to the Altoids Curiously Strong Collection," Exhibitions. Retrieved May 22, 2023. among others. He been awarded the American Academy in Rome Prize,American Academy in Rome. All Fellows. Retrieved May 22, 2023. and his work belongs to the art collections of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art,Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Progress of Village Wen, Yun-Fei Ji, Art Collection. Retrieved May 22, 2023. British Museum,The British Museum Yun-Fei Ji, Collection. Retrieved May 22, 2023. Whitney Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art.Philadelphia Museum of Art. On the High Branches, Yun-Fei Ji, Collection. Retrieved May 22, 2023.
He is represnted by James Cohan Gallery in New York City.
Early life and career Ji was born in 1963 in Beijing, China, the son of an army doctor.University of Arkansas. "Fulbright College to Honor Distinguished Alumni," News. April 12, 2006. Retrieved May 19, 2023.Art 21. Yun-Fei Ji, Artists. Retrieved May 19, 2023. He grew up amid the decade-long Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), during which his mother was sent to a labor camp for re-education. For those two years he was cared for by his grandparents, who introduced him to calligraphy and ghost stories, both of which have figured in his art; at age ten, he began studies with a military officer who created illustrations for the People's Liberation Army.Spears, Dorothy. "Part Traditionalist, Part Naturalist, Part Dissident," The New York Times, February 20, 2010. Retrieved May 19, 2023. Ji attended the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (BFA, 1982), learning oil painting in the still state-sanctioned style of Socialist realism; he was among the first generation to study there after its post-Cultural Revolution reopening.Heinrich, Will. "Yun-Fei Ji," The New York Times, May 16, 2018. Retrieved May 19, 2023.
After graduating, Ji taught for two years at the School of Arts and Crafts in Beijing and secretly studied calligraphy and classical painting in the imperial Song dynasty tradition—both of which were considered bourgeois, obsolete and forbidden.Morgan, Robert C. "Ghosts and Ghouls on Grand Street: Yun-Fei Ji at James Cohan," Artcritical, May 17, 2018. Retrieved May 19, 2023. In 1986 he emigrated after winning a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Arkansas, where he earned an MFA in 1989. In the U.S., he discovered the German Expressionists and Philip Guston, and integrated elements of their humor and stylized figures into his scroll-style watercolor and ink works.Sheets, Hilarie M. "Underrated/Overrated," ARTnews, January, 2005, p. 106–07. Retrieved May 19, 2023.
Ji moved to New York in 1990. Between 1997 and 2004, his work began receiving wider attention through group exhibitions at the Bronx MuseumCotter, Holland. "A Flock of Fledglings, Testing Their Wings," The New York Times, August 1, 1997. Retrieved May 19, 2023. and Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art,Zimmer, William. "Surveying New York's Art World," The New York Times, December 2, 2001. p. CN14. Retrieved May 22, 2023. the 2002 Whitney Biennial,Cotter, Holland. "Spiritual America, From Ecstatic To Transcendent," The New York Times, March 8, 2002. Retrieved May 19, 2023. and solo shows at Pierogi,Smith, Roberta. "Yun-Fei Ji," The New York Times, June 29, 2001. p. E35. Retrieved May 19, 2023. Pratt Manhattan GalleryJohnson, Ken. "Yun-Fei Ji – 'The Old One Hundred Names,'", The New York Times, April 4, 2003. Retrieved May 19, 2023. and Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
In his later career, Ji has had solo exhibitions at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing, 2012),UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. "Yun-Fei Ji: Water Work," Exhibitions. Retrieved May 22, 2023. the Wellin Museum of Art (2016), Cleveland Museum of Art (2016)Cleveland Museum of Art. "Ji Yun-Fei: Last Days of Village Wen," Exhibitions. Retrieved May 22, 2023. and Kalamazoo Institute of Arts (2021),Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. "Yun-Fei Ji: Tall Tales of a Scavenger," Exhibitions. Retrieved May 22, 2023. as well as the James Cohan Gallery (New York, 2006–present)Frankel, David. "Yun-Fei Ji at James Cohan Gallery," Artforum, March 2007. p. 315–16. Retrieved May 22, 2023. and Zeno X Gallery (Antwerp, 2003–present).Pirotte, Phillipe, ed. and Sarah Schmerler. Yun-Fei Ji: The Old One Hundred Names, Antwerp, Belgium: Zeno X Gallery, 2003. Retrieved May 22, 2023. He also exhibited in the Lyon Biennale (2011),Noorthoorn, Victoria et al. 11th Lyon Biennale: A Terrible Beauty Is Born, Dijon: Les Presses du Reél, 2011. Retrieved May 22, 2023. Biennale of Sydney (2012),Miller, Alan. "Altogether Now: The 18th Biennale of Sydney,", New York Arts, July 8, 2012. Retrieved May 22, 2023. Prospect New Orleans (2014),MacCash, Doug. "Prospect.3 artist Yun-Fei Ji's 60-foot scroll painting is an ecological cautionary tale," Times-Picayune/NOLA.com, December 2, 2014. Retrieved May 19, 2023. Shanghai Biennale (2014),Williams, Maxwell. "Shanghai Biennale Reveals China at a Crossroads," Art in America, December 10, 2014. Retrieved May 19, 2023. and the surveys "Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art," (Smart Museum of Art, 2008),Wu Hung with Jason McGrath and Stephanie Smith. Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Retrieved May 22, 2023. "Medals of Dishonour" (British Museum, 2009), and "Show and Tell: Stories in Chinese Paintings" (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018).Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Show and Tell: Stories in Chinese Painting," Exhibitions. Retrieved May 22, 2023.
Work and reception Ji draws upon personal, historical, cultural and political sources for inspiration: his memories of Maoist rule, classical and folk art, literature and deep research into instances of human displacement and environmental destruction in the name of modernization. For most of his career, he has worked in the scroll-painting traditions of the Tang, Song and Yuan dynasties, using ink, mineral pigments and brushes on xuan paper and washi paper.La Rocco, Ben. "Yun-Fei Ji: mistaking each other for ghosts," The Brooklyn Rail, April 2, 2010. Retrieved May 19, 2023. His paintings often have the weathered, crinkled and creased look of premature age, making a sense of the passage of time physically tangible. He characteristically paints with a wide range of marks derived from observations of nature: supple brushstrokes and line, mottled areas, abstract drips and precise evocations of rock, water, flora and fauna.Ji, Yun-Fei. "Artist Yun-Fei Ji on how he paints," The Guardian, September 20, 2009. Retrieved May 22, 2023. Compositionally, he employs dissonant perspectives and shifts in scale that undercut the consistency of landscapes, narrative flow, or simple interpretations.
Into these classical approaches Ji has introduced expressionistic figurative modes that have been likened to artists such as George Grosz and James Ensor.Yau, John. "Yun-Fei Ji’s Great Leap Forward," Hyperallergic, January 4, 2023. Retrieved May 19, 2023. His work often derives impact from deliberate juxtapositions of anachronistic techniques and symbols—flattened and stacked perspective, idyllic settings, ghost-like characters inspired by folktales—with contemporary elements such as abstraction and modern events, buildings and technologies. Critics have described the resulting sociopolitical critiques as multilayered, disturbing and fantastical, compassionate, satirical and blackly humorous. John Yau characterized Yi as "a chronicler with a novelist's eye for rich, reverberating detail," whose work evokes the contradictions, ruptures and elisions of both "rapid, irrevocable change and tradition's glacial pace … with immense tenderness and inconsolable mourning."
Works and exhibitions, 2001–10
Ji's painting in early solo exhibitions at Pierogi (2001) and Pratt Manhattan (2003) resembled friezelike, all-over fields whose ruptured decorative backdrops and landscapes revealed calamitous scenes of disaster and decay, populated by Goyaesque figures in grotesque masks and costumes.Knafo, Robert. "Yun-Fei Ji: Moral Vistas," Art in America, June 2003. Artforum'''s Michael Wilson wrote that this work (e.g., Wedding Ballad, 2002) "conjured a world in turmoil that oscillates between the safety of centuries-old tradition and [present-day] mortal terror."
Throughout the 2000s, Ji rooted surreal allegories of modernization in field research he conducted on communities affected by man-made and natural disasters.Genocchio, Benjamin. "Through Ink and Brush, A Melding of Traditions," The New York Times, May 4, 2003. Retrieved May 19, 2023. These included entire Chinese villages involuntarily dislodged by colossal hydroelectric projects and Hurricane Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, which he connected through the theme of government failure.Lau, Venus. "The Tenth Shanghai Biennale," Artforum, February 2015. Retrieved May 19, 2023.Garcia, Carnelia. "Interview: Yun-Fei Ji," Modern Painters, April 2010. The "Empty City" paintings (Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2004) centered on the Chinese Three Gorges Dam project, specifically, its displacement of an estimated 1,500,000 people (largely minorities) and submergence of thousands of villages and significant archaeological sites, forever altering both landscape and culture.Richard, Frances. "Yun-Fei Ji," Artforum, January 2004, p. 64. Retrieved May 22, 2023. His fractured, panoramic scrolls (e.g., Empty City—calling the dead, 2003) presented multiple perspectives and self-contained vignettes that moved between past, present and future, refusing any easy message.