Wei Jia's Recent Works

Wei Jia Studio P. O. Box 210091, Woodhaven, NY 11421 718 296 0438 weijia@weijiastudio.com

Solo Show 2007

Duo Show 2007

------------------------

Wei Jia: made in Beijing / new york

Oct. 26 - Nov. 22, 2006

Opening: Oct. 26, 6:00 - 8:00 PM

http://www.china2000fineart.com/onexhibit/ONEXHIBIT.HTML

5 East 57th St.

New York City. 212 588 1198

-------------------

East Transplanted West

9. 14 - 11. 7, 2006

catalog available

Wei Jia, Ming Fay, Hu Bing, Pan Xinlei, Cui Fei, Qin Feng, Zheng Lianjie

CAS Gallery Kean University

1000 Marris Ave. Union, NJ 07083

tel: 908 737 4407 www.kean.edu

--------------------

Painting is calligraphy, and calligraphy is painting

The letters in Western alphabets have long since lost their connection to the symbols from which they arose, streamlining into efficient, interchangeable parts in sentences such as this. The thousands of characters that make up written Chinese have also undergone a process of abstraction; but each ideogram still exists to some degree as an image, redolent of the pictorial symbolism at its source. The high art of Chinese calligraphy, elaborated by numerous masters over two millennia, recognizes this intimate, oscillating dance of meaning and form.

Wei Jia has this knowledge in his fingers, muscles and bones, thanks to early, intensive study of traditional painting, calligraphy and literature with a single teacher, Zhang Boju. Following an equally thorough apprenticeship in European painting at Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts, he came to this country and began the harder task of integrating these extremes of training in his own way.

Soon after recognizable human figures disappeared from the surfaces of his layered and subtle paintings, the Chinese characters reemerged. With eyes conditioned by close looking at abstract work by masters such as Mark Rothko and Agnes Martin, Wei saw the flowing ideograms as "already a perfect form of abstract art."1 His growing body of Chinese Calligrapher paintings offers us a sampling of characters, stunning in their visual range, faithfully copied from masters who worked as early as 200 AD. Enlarged for our observing pleasure, they float in fields of snowy white, inky gray, glowing parchment-yellow, pomegranate.

Unlike their originals, most of Wei's characters are not directly brushed, but more painstakingly outlined and then filled in. As with Jonathan Lasker's post-expressionist abstractions, this effectively slows the viewer's eye, perhaps with the aim of making us see the ancient forms fresh, and directing us to journey patiently through the painting as in a traditional Chinese landscape. Unmoored from their burden of conveying specific meaning (at least to non-Chinese-reading viewers), the ideograms relax into personality-rich "characters," flinging looping tails or, with the more architectural forms of a calligrapher like Yan Zhenqing, proudly displaying their structural integrity. They even function as quasi-surrealist personnages, offering the artist the eerie sensation of tracing human limbs and torsos as he draws them.

Like the characters themselves, hovering between symbol and formal sign, Jia's paintings hover between states: between tradition and the present, figuration and abstraction, document and irreducible mood, one culture and another. With delicate touch, they invite us in each case to experience how to partake of both at once.

-Miriam Seidel

1 conversation with the artist, February 2004

The title is quoted from a statement by the artist.

Miriam Seidel is a corresponding editor for Art in America