Yun-Fei Ji

Yun-Fei Ji (born 1963) is a Chinese-American painter who has been based largely in New York City since 1990.

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.

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 US.

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."

Ji has exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), S.M.A.K. (Ghent), the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum and New Museum, among others.

He been awarded the American Academy in Rome Prize, and his work belongs to the art collections of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, British Museum, Whitney Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Ji was born in 1963 in Beijing, China, the son of an army doctor.

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.

Ji attended the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) 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.

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.

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 US, 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.

Ji moved to New York in 1990.

Between 1997 and 2004, his work began receiving wider attention through group exhibitions at the Bronx Museum and Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Biennial (2002), and solo shows at Pierogi, Pratt Manhattan Gallery and Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

Throughout the 2000s, Ji rooted surreal allegories of modernization in field research he conducted on communities affected by man-made and natural disasters.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

In exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery ("Water That Floats the Boat Can Also Sink It," 2007; "Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts," 2010), Ji's epic, cautionary scrolls delved further into the project, portraying migration in physical and psychic terms that emphasized loss and a literal haunting of those supplanted by melancholic wraiths and scraggly scavengers (e.g., Last Days Before the Flood, 2006).

The show included the ten-foot-wide horizontal scroll, Migrants of the Three Gorges Dam (2009), which was hand-printed from 500 carved woodblocks.

It portrayed dispossessed farmers and flooded landscapes alongside calligraphic reports and descriptions of the flooding of the Yangtze River based on Ji's own research, interviews and observations.

He also exhibited in the Lyon Biennale (2011), Biennale of Sydney (2012), Prospect New Orleans (2014), Shanghai Biennale (2014), and the surveys "Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art," (Smart Museum of Art, 2008), "Medals of Dishonour" (British Museum, 2009), and "Show and Tell: Stories in Chinese Paintings" (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018).

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 rice and mulberry paper.

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.

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.

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."

In his later career, Ji has had solo exhibitions at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing, 2012), the Wellin Museum of Art (2016), Cleveland Museum of Art (2016) and Kalamazoo Institute of Arts (2021), as well as the James Cohan Gallery (New York, 2006–present) and Zeno X Gallery (Antwerp, 2003–present).

The scrolls included the cinematic, nearly 60-foot-long The Village and its Ghosts (2014) and the ironically titled Village Wen’s Progress (2017).

Both offered a sense of perpetual transition and history repeating itself through an amalgam of settings and signifiers: the devastation of New Orleans, migrants piled with their meager, worldly goods, details of the Nan Shui Bei Diao megaproject, and scenes of Columbus Park in Manhattan.

The imagery of Village Wen’s Progress functioned both literally and symbolically, with collapsing scaffolding, ominous ever-present ghosts and thematic movement from mundane drudgery to hallucinatory chaos that related physical dislocation to mental disintegration.

Ji's survey "The Intimate Universe" (Wellin Museum, 2016) and exhibition "Rumors, Ridicules, and Retributions" (James Cohan, 2018) presented more than a decade's work, ranging from sketch studies to his first sculptures (skeletal figures made from paper pulp) to finished paintings and monumental scrolls.

In the latter show, Ji was inspired by the ghost stories of the 18th-century Chinese writer Pu Songling and the French writer, Marquis de Sade, in several works linking Sade's decadent noblemen to contemporary Chinese political leaders.