Inexpressible Gloom - Jia Aili
March, 2006
Place: Classoom of grade three
Department of Oil Painting,
Luxun Academy of Fine Arts
Dialogist: Fu Xiaodong, Sun Ning

Fu Xiaodong(hereafter refers to ‘Fu’): Your painting combines both mural and panorama, the sky, ground, clouds and smoke, are the technique after you had experienced panorama, how do you pick-up these elements?
Jia Aili (hereafter refers to ‘Jia’): I graduated from the realistic painting studio, and have been strictly trained with portrait-painting, I can find what I like, but haven’t found what I am suitable for yet, every fresh graduate will face such problem. I had ardent enthusiasm for panorama painting, afterwards I found it isn’t a personal work. I don’t regard painting as a work, only a way to live. Once done the drawing as same as panorama is helpful to control the measure of painting, so that you won’t be scared when facing big picture like the size of six meters. Big size mural hadn’t affected me much. I am disappointed at it because my assumption didn’t transfer at all.

Fu: You must pay more attention to the field of art. I feel you are very concerned about the text.
Jia: Yes, significance means a lot to me. What I have been doing in this period is I want to exactly express my depressed feelings that I have been suffered for long time. Then I suddenly found a little afflatus. Especially when drawing Bed, which should be the summary works for this phase, the blues is expressed out. People at my age, whose mentality is oppressive or depressed, but I am blues. Oppression is different with the blues. I have no definite conflict in front of me, it isn’t mystic, but I just cannot express it out. People at our age, compared with former several generations, don’t suffer any tough hardship and frustration. But the agony exists in everyone’s heart, no matter what background you have, what your family’s conditions are, etc. And I don’t know where the agony comes from.

Fu: Depression maybe has some external causes, but the blues is the feeling of one own. The word of blues is easy to be associated with depression, in which covers various items. Can you specific?

Jia: I think some of the blues come from a certain potential violence that isn’t formal but the ideological contradictory. I don’t think that I am seriously depressed. When there is no one in the studio, spreading out the gloomy mood on canvas can make me happy, even if the mental action is complex. Whereas I feel uncomfortable make contact with people. I have been suffered from mental agony and, more or less, all of my classmates feel the same.

Fu: I think people from the end of 70s are more suffered from the pressure of the reality and spirit, the environment stimulate them and form the pain inside. This pressure is invisible, hidden, and structural. Its biggest characteristic is the conversion of the value view. Someone said they were the generation who lost their faith.

Jia: We were crazy about collectivistic spirit before, even want to pay something out for it, but now I am really......I think that the adults who once gave us the hope won’t give us the answer about tomorrow. I have faith and I am different from the people of 80s, least not the generation who are broken down. Now I cannot tell the ideal, because there is nothing occurs when it is time to realize the ideal. None of the things planned before has occurred by this time. We still live a mediocre life.
To be able to draw was just a hobby for me in the beginning, and it changed my status and my personal appearance among my little fellows, even the status in parent’s eyes. Of course the main point was to love painting. Our education system pays less attention to each of us, like the factory produce cans. When I found the painting couldn’t change everything, so the function of painting was meant to be changed again, it became soliloquy.
Sun Ning(hereafter refers to ‘Sun’): it more as to go back to a nature. People who truly love arts found where his nature stays. Some of them choose to express using vocabulary while some using paintbrush.
Jia: I seem to depend on the feeling of blues since it gives me the possibility to have the conversation with irrational faculty. In modern world the irrationality is always abused by rationality. Our individual life will wither in this framed rational world, likely the waterdrop will permeate the steely cage, finally become the bloodlike rust trace. It isn’t a kind of expression, but just a life. I come over in this way day by day. Especially in last two years, my work has been painted realistically, only sometimes beyond the reality. I don’t know if it is conformed to the kinetics of the mixing between body and moral or not. 80% of my time is only contacting myself. What you thought when you wake up in the morning may not be the same at night. Another strange thing is I haven’t been contacting any artists during last two years.
Sun: What does this painting of burning Bed mean? Is it objective burning and in the deep of your heart, or a ruin?
Jia: It is my true feeling. Although it expresses a smell of evanescence, it has a desire and expectation for the nice future, like the burning Bed.

Fu: It is relevant to the desperation in your heart. Like Wang Jiawei’s movie, it won’t tell the secret of heart until see the end of the world
.
Jia: It is despair. The world is beautiful in a sense, but its disadvantage will hurt you very much when you come closely to see it. The villainy that people usually want to block out appears again, and with an odd appearance to threaten the public, so various parlances about the certain villainy appear from all aspects. This villainy is substantial and moral as well. Moreover, this dualism includes the mixed power of encroachment and threat. My works is a mental expression about the failed hopes. Going to the seaside is the end of illogicality. It should be a show of my attitude to the reality. There is still no definite subject, it only wrote “Willing to follow you forever, but there is no forever”. The picture made me weep, and I wanted to call that girl, but nothing seemed to be said.

Fu: Do you mean your painting reflects your love life?
Jia: Like that car turns over, smoke, fire, beach, barren grassplot and so on, these signs appear in my work, and most of them are disposal of my blues. Things of winter are with no vital force. The scene I like the most is the chaos after the orgiastic party, the noise of it is still lingering, lonely scene. The beach has the trace of human, and the weed shoal is walled. These things are also relevant to human beings, they are scenery but still not landscape painting.
The sea never appears peace to me, what’s more is deadness and dreadfulness. Sea usually makes people feel released, but not for me. This scenery’s formal beauty can easily make me fall into the grief. I’m afraid of loneliness but don’t like jollification either. In my works, I put the people in opened scenery, reduced the size of him, the character’s image become out of focus. Put in a despair wild space, people and his thought both are small, the sky pressing and the ground supports, whatever you do is small. The previous flighty thoughts, in which I thought I could do anything you like if I have been trained in a good feat, has changed accidentally now. Life influences one in a slow and unconscious way that scares me a lot.

Sun: It doesn’t mean the setback in love causes you pain, or also caused by society?
Jia: Death filled in my mind when I couldn’t see any hope. My works also expatiated on the life. What I’m scared is time, for it changes you quietly to an unknown direction, and distort the life I described, that is the biggest fear to me. My understanding toward life and death is like the death exists both in “Beach” and “Bed”.

Fu: How to face an unknown change in advance? Do you scare that you will repeat yourself again and again or you won’t be the person you used to be?
Jia: It won’t stop me yearning for new life enthusiastically whenever I’ve got hurt. And the next pursue I will engage has nothing to do with the previous stuff.
Fu: The expression of your painting looks strange sometimes. Your graduation object seems to show your opinion toward our society.

Jia: The status of the two people sitting on sofa is easy to be identified, an intellectual’s anxiety and a model’s vacuity. It is the relation between people and people, or between you and yourself. The two states are hard to be consonant, and tied together by destiny. The society of China is complex. When I was young in Dan Dong, the folkway was unsophisticated and simple. Now it is much more complex to my comprehension. That time when I was in 789 made me had a new understanding on the professional artist’s status. In my opinion, Chinese contemporary art circumstance isn’t very optimistic and its expansion isn’t relevant to my desire for the culture! I have been infantile thinking that a pure artist should have the courage to go into a farther and lonelier extremity, in order to prove some things or the worth of thinking independently.

Sun: Why do you choose a fairly traditional form of art to express? Have you ever thought about using other medium, such as installation?

Jia : Yes. There is also this possibility. But I won’t abandon painting on canvas, because it is my profession. And I still have too much to express, at least it won’t be finished in next several years or decade, so I will insist on it. When I was in school I made the installation ever, but it was made badly, and economically wasn’t good enough either. Many thoughts arose by chance during the process of painting, a rapid circumrotation, the more you do, the winder they are. Now it sometimes is withdrawing back to the deepest of my heart by the painting. The two forms of art are very incompatible, cannot be gained at the same time. It’s been a long time that I have suspected everything around me, and have kept distance to new phenomenon in a visible way.