The publication of “Yuan Jai Reader Vol.1” emphasizes on the cultural version and narrations constructed by Yuan Jai’s long term art practices, through a constellation of selected works over the last 50 years, the writings will parallelly explore the complexity of Yuan Jai’s cultural narrations behind the image and open up further research and discussion.
If we trace back what Walter Benjamin said, “the art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out,” [1] then Yuan Jai revives the narrative potential of Chinese painting by continuously positioning the narrative within the relationship between the individual and history. She explores the cultural ecosystem cultivated by individual life experience, thereby developing a series of cultural narratives. Only by locating these narratives within continuous—rather than fragmented—cultural processes can the artist enter into the realm of life philosophy through the composition of a painting.
Yuan Jai’s paintings contain an intricate lineage of artists past, but they also strike postures of rebellion. The result is a new vitality within Chinese painting that compels us to ask: what kind of life experience must an artist endure to re-idiomaticalize all these bio-cultural elements or roles into a refreshing cosmic image, thereby transfiguring the creation of her oeuvre into an epic voyage across the cultural cosmos?
[Contents]
Essays in the book including:
Aida Yuan Wong : Yuan Jai’s Deconstructive Paintings and Craft Conceptualism: Sentiments of the 1.5 Generation
Hu Fang: Give Me a Pair of Elegant Wings and the Light Contained within Darkness
Chien-Hung Huang: Roaming the Cultural Cosmos
[ Selected Pages]
Yuan Jai, through marvelous skills, sensitivity to materiality and color, and an enchanting contemporariness that cuts across time and space, forges an optimistic rebellion that moves the soul.
——Aida Yuen Wong: Yuan Jai’s Deconstructive Paintings and Craft Conceptualism: Sentiments of the 1.5 Generation
As Yuan Jai’s paintings express the individual experience as an intense and brilliant visual world, they simultaneously concentrate cultural experience into an analysis of values worthy of communal consideration.
——Hu Fang: Give Me a Pair of Elegant Wings and the Light Contained within Darkness
Yuan Jai turned conciliation into a line of flight, along which she established her constant insistence and cultural attitude. In general, she treats the cosmic images in her paintings as repeated tests for our Weltanschauung, the tests that entail the tug-of-war between history and knowledge.
——Chien-Hung Huang: Roaming the Cultural Cosmos
Concept: The Pavilion
Language: Chinese, English
Size: 26 × 17.5 cm
Pages: 152 (full color printing)
Year: 2021
The Pavilion
Photo by Wen Peng
Image and Text: the shop, ©Authors, the shop, 2021
About the Artist >>
Further Reading>>