Vitamin Creative Space at Art Basel | Paris 2025
Yuan Jai: No Sorrows Tonight
“No Sorrows Tonight” traces the artist’s creative journey spanning several decades. The exhibition timeline extends back to the late 1980s, a pivotal moment when Yuan resumed painting, and continues to her most recent works, outlining a vivid and colorful trajectory of artistic evolution.
A crucial turning point in Yuan’s life came in her later forties, when she made the decisive choice to pick up the brush again—thus embarking on a demanding yet profound journey. Her return to art began with the motif of shanshui painting (literally “mountain and water painting”), through which she re-examined the spiritual and formal foundations of Chinese art. In Yuan’s practice, shanshui becomes a language for negotiating between cultural memory and contemporary sensibility. Inspired by Dong Qichang (1555–1636) and his painting methods and theories, Yuan’s thinking also extends from Dong’s conceptual approach toward the modernist exploration of “form” and “new reality,” leading to her breakthrough in what she terms “altered landscapes.”
Looking back from today, we may be astonished by the “cultural space” that Yuan has cultivated through decades of practice—a space capable of encompassing complex, layered histories and cultural strata, reflecting crystalline memories of life, and giving rise to an ever-expanding cultural imagination.
From Concealed Grace (1989) to Inner Journey (c. 1995), from Silent Mountain, Spiritual Valley (c. 1996) to Where the Green Mountain Faces (c. 1997), Yuan weaves color and line into intertwined forms that both construct and dissolve the very structure of “landscape,” entering what she describes as a realm “where to see mountains and waters one must forget mountains and waters—where mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters.”
In her recent work No Sorrows Tonight (2024), all things seem to transcend gravity and float in suspension: oracle-bone inscriptions descend from the sky, ancient language diffuses into the air, becoming rain, becoming breath. These forms—derived from the archaic symbols of oracle-bone and jade—belong both to the past and to the future. Like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, they embody compassion and empathy for “what has happened and what is yet to come.”
Artist’s Biography
Yuan Jai was born in 1941 in Chongqing, Sichuan province, into a family for whom art and culture were part of daily life, and grew up immersed in Chinese calligraphy and painting. In 1958, she entered the Department of Art at the Taiwan Provincial Normal Universityi. After graduation in 1962, she went to Europe to further her studies, first with a master degree in the Department of Archaeology and Fine Art History at the Université Catholique de Louvain, then with doctoral studies on preservation and conservation of cultural artifacts at the Institut royal du Patrimoine artistique (IRPA) in Brussels. Yuan returned to Taiwan in 1969 and joined the Department of Antiquities of the National Palace Museum in Taipei. There she established the Office of Technology, the first museum department dedicated to the conservation of cultural relics in Taiwan. Yuan Jai did not resume her painting practice until her forties. Since picking up her painting brush again in 1987, Yuan Jai has attempted to find innovative methods of Chinese painting by using the tradition as the foundation, and incorporating the skills and concepts she has encountered and absorbed in the course of her multiple life experiences.
Galleries
A13
VIP Days (by invitation only)
Wednesday, October 22, 2025, 10 am to 8 pm
Thursday, October 23, 2025,11 am to 8 pm
Vernissage (access with a Vernissage ticket or invitation)
Thursday, October 23, 2025, 2 pm to 8 pm
Public Days (access with a ticket or invitation)
Friday, October 24 – Sunday, October 26, 2025, 11 am to 7 pm
Venue
Grand Palais, 3 avenue du Général Eisenhower, 75008, Paris
Contact mail@vitamincreativespace.com
For more information, please visit
https://vitamincreativespace.com/en/?artist=yuan-jai
https://www.artbasel.com
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- Exhibition views of Vitamin’s project “Yuan Jai” for Art Basel Paris, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
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- Exhibition views of Vitamin’s project “Yuan Jai” for Art Basel Paris, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
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- Exhibition views of Vitamin’s project “Yuan Jai” for Art Basel Paris, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
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- Exhibition views of Vitamin’s project “Yuan Jai” for Art Basel Paris, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
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- Exhibition views of Vitamin’s project “Yuan Jai” for Art Basel Paris, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
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- Exhibition views of Vitamin’s project “Yuan Jai” for Art Basel Paris, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
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- Exhibition views of Vitamin’s project “Yuan Jai” for Art Basel Paris, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
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- Exhibition views of Vitamin’s project “Yuan Jai” for Art Basel Paris, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
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- Exhibition views of Vitamin’s project “Yuan Jai” for Art Basel Paris, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
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- Exhibition views of Vitamin’s project “Yuan Jai” for Art Basel Paris, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
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- Exhibition views of Vitamin’s project “Yuan Jai” for Art Basel Paris, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
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- Exhibition views of Vitamin’s project “Yuan Jai” for Art Basel Paris, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
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- Exhibition views of Vitamin’s project “Yuan Jai” for Art Basel Paris, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
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- Exhibition views of Vitamin’s project “Yuan Jai” for Art Basel Paris, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
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- Exhibition views of Vitamin’s project “Yuan Jai” for Art Basel Paris, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
Exhibition views of Vitamin’s project “Yuan Jai” for Art Basel Paris, Paris, 2025.
Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.