Lot 395: JIA AILI

JIA AILI B. 1979 ON THE FIELD OF HOPES signed in initials, titled in Chinese and dated 2007 oil on canvas 163.8 by 265 cm.; 64 1/2 by 104 1/4 in.

MADHOUSE Contemporary, Hong Kong

Jia Aili is widely recognized as one of the most exciting new painters to emerge in the second half of the last decade. His artistic persona is inseparable from the northeastern city of Shenyang, where he trained at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts and continued to work throughout most of his twenties. Born in 1979, Jia is of the generation that came of age with China's economic reforms, but like all social transformations, those reforms created winners and losers. Many of the losers were industrial workers in places like Shenyang.

We would be brazen not to read the title of this work, created just before Jia Aili's career began to take off with numerous shows in Beijing and Shanghai in 2008 and 2009, as anything other than ironic. On the Field of Hopes depicts a lone figure, wearing a gas mask, standing waist deep in a field of ambiguous pink flowers. The horizon cuts straight across the painting, although the separation between the faded blue of the sky and the receding pink of the flowers is anything but pronounced. Just to the right of the composition's center, a plume of black smoke spirals up and then out to the far right edge of the painting, indicating some unknown industrial or environmental disaster, or perhaps a military incident. Significantly, the figure is clad in the uniform of a Chinese schoolchild: white polo shirt, red scarf, and perhaps most tellingly the two stripes which mark a mid-ranking member of the Communist Party children's organization, the Young Pioneers.

The critic Karen Smith once wrote, "Jia Aili is in something of a conundrum; making art very much of the present in terms of its sensibilities and the issues he seeks to tackle, and yet often, it seems, by means that are overly familiar in terms of how oil paint is brought to canvas, and how the compositions are structured." This conundrum is one facing many artists who graduate from China's elite academies, where their contemporary subjectivities run up against the pedagogy of the state oil-painting apparatus. The results can be puzzling and delightful, as youthful concerns and anxieties find expression through a more traditionally inflected compositional and painterly sensibility. This sort of fusion of the socialist realist apparatus with current subject matter was pioneered by another great Liaoning painter, Liu Xiaodong, in the early 1990s; in recent years, it has been a group of younger artists, led by Jia Aili, who have picked up the banner of this fusion.

Shortly after completing this painting, Jia Aili would move to Beijing and begin a series of environmental painting projects which climaxed with his 2009 work Hibernation at the ArtMia Foundation, in which he moved into a gallery space and made his studio a site for public spectatorship, completing a wall-sized painting with the same warlike compositional elements that ground this earlier painting. As Jia continues to emerge and develop as an artist, his early works become increasingly key to understanding his distinct starting point.