By Lu Mingjun
A fundamentalist painter, Ni Jun believes painting is everything, and everything is a form of painting. That being said, painting is unquestionably the only universal way to perceive and observe every bit of the world.
At one point, Ni Jun was inextricably and intricately obsessed with Manet’s paintings. He spent more than ten years on intensive study of every detail of Manet’s brushstrokes, color palette, and different shades. Ni’s detailed investigation even expanded to the emotional depth created by the artist. His aim, however, was not to find out how the artist had drawn up rules; instead, he cherished the feelings of the moment when reading and re-reading Manet’s work. In other words, all of Ni’s paintings of landscape, still life, and portrait from the period served as the notes he had taken while reading Manet’s paintings. His interest in Manet’s art was more than an indication of his identification of Manet’s artistic interests. Furthermore, for Ni, the value of Manet’s paintings lies in their role as a transition point in the history of art and the tension created in the artworks. The art historians have reminded us that Manet, who had undergone rapid changes during the times, sought to balance or resist the accelerated development of the times and the unprecedented liberation of perception.
In the late 1980s, Ni Jun, who had just graduated from the Mural Painting Department of the Central Academy of Arts and Design, went to Rutgers University to study art. However, throughout his fifteen years of living and working overseas, Ni was firmly struck by the modern painters like Manet (and the mood and images produced by brushes and inks in traditional Chinese paintings too) other than the prototypical forms of art, including Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and the uproarious Conceptual Art of the times in the US. The latter, in Ni’s words, was “sick and miserable schizophrenia of modern Anglo-Saxon art”. This was not only inseparable from his college education in China but also caused by the complex politics of identity within contemporary art in America, or to simply put it, there was a rigid separation between the artist and the Americana of contemporary art. This seemed to be universal and related to other artists, such as Liu Xiaodong. Back in the early 1990s, Liu went to New York for the first time and felt the same way. Liu said that he was struck by South American art and black American art that had been deeply rooted in their own cultural heritage other than the so-called “American Art”. Such a feeling reconfirmed Liu’s determined aspiration. However, Ni believes, over the past century, we haven’t grasped the internals and nuanced subtleties of Western painting as our understanding has been far from sophisticated and thorough. It was his continued observation and investigation of the original work in his years abroad that allowed him to deepen his understanding step by step. Therefore, to a great extent, his artistic creation — or work — has been made to bring to light the details hidden in the history of art and to bring them to China.
Although keeping in mind that it would be a thankless task, Ni Jun had never got tired of it as he convinced himself that it was a necessary step for Western painting to enter China. After he returned to China at the beginning of the new century, Ni found that the Chinese art world had already been radically changed. His initial goal seemed completely out of tune with the times. At last, he decided to continue for his own sake. Like a pirate, Ni “plunders” from place to place, but he has never found a place to settle down. This exhibition serves as a “fracture”: although the paintings are characterized by his long-established artistic language, especially the technique of brushstroke and saturation of the color, it is manifestly evident that he is no longer extremely cautious or remarkably restrained; instead, he experiments with a brutal aesthetics and an unscrupulous manner of making paintings. This is because he is mindful that it is utterly disgraceful to pursue elegance and leisure.
Ni Jun explored a possibility in the cheetah’s body, which has appeared time after time in his new works. In this context, a cheetah doesn’t only serve as the motif and the image of the picture, it also functions as the artist’s self-referentiality. From all points of view, it is a metaphor for the ways in which the closed matrix of realities can be overcome through barbaric aesthetics to achieve a new kind of freedom. I have to admit that all pirates and cheetahs seem to be sent out of a place by order of deportation. The space they live in — be it the sea, the land, the airspace — has become more confined and restricted. At the same time, however, it is them that has generated another force in opposition to established art. As Hal Foster reminds us in his new book Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg, at a moment of crisis, “barbarism” has no longer been a stereotype of its own, a decoration for the middle class, or creaturely kitsch; instead, it is to activate the fractures.
June 29, 2021
