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St. Louis, Missouri,
January, 2004 ¡V In his first solo museum exhibition, artist Yun-Fei Ji shares his long-time interest in the social, political and environmental affects occurring in China due to the construction of the world's largest dam, Three Gorges Dam. On January 23, the
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (the Contemporary) opens the second exhibition in its new building, 3750 Washington Boulevard, in Grand Center, with internationally-renowned artist Yun-Fei Ji and his exhibition The Empty City.
Painted on rice paper with mineral inks, Ji presents The Empty City as a series of eight related landscapes. Each landscape depicts autumn, as a metaphor for the season, as well as to signify the end of a life cycle. For his exhibition at the Contemporary, Ji has created new paintings that reflect his interest in the affects the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, has had and will have on the people who live in the Yangtze River region. His paintings portray an almost prophetic view of what hundreds of thousands of people in the Yangtze River region will face.
Shannon Fitzgerald, curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, describes the exhibition, "Within Ji's autumnal, veiled landscapes, are scenarios that compress the past, present and future. They also present the failure of Modernist utopian ideas and perhaps warn of what China's future may hold. From a distance, Ji's traditional brush paintings seem to hearken back to the atmospheric landscapes of the Sung Dynasty painters, but viewers who approach the work closely are quickly brought through time as his mists, waterways, mountains, architecture, and people reveal toxic clouds, boiling polluted waters, dangerous craggy mountains, fallen modernist buildings and scavengers and ghosts."
 
Ji's dark imagery also includes stylized abstractions that may or may not refer to speech scrolls, intestines, explosions or underworld movement. Using traditional materials (inks, muted pigments, Chinese brushes and handmade mulberry paper), Ji employs age-old methods to illuminate historic and contemporary concerns in a compressed and urgent space. His recent work deals with such issues as the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, and the environmental impact of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River region, scheduled for completion in 2009.
While his landscapes are influenced by his Chinese predecessors, they also depart from traditional methods in a number of ways. First, Ji plays with our perceptions of space and scale, giving his landscapes a surreal, disconnected quality. Second, instead of the spatial depth achieved by the Sung Dynasty landscape painters, Ji's overloaded scenes and non-sensical space/time relationships seem to push the picture plane into the viewers' space. Third, Ji populates his landscapes with unporportional mythical, political or historical figures that create enigmatic and fascinating narratives for viewers to unravel. Fitzgerald adds ¡§While The Empty City is about the possible fate of thousands of people in China, these new pieces make you contemplate each individual's place and position between the past and present, between nature and the man-made, and most of all- within contemporary global culture."
Support for Yun-Fei Ji: The Empty City has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Regional Arts Commission St. Louis and the Arts & Education Council.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Yun-Fei Ji was included in the Whitney Biennial 2002 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and has exhibited at The Pratt Manhattan Gallery and the Drawing Center in New York City and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut, in addition to others. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Sharpe Foundation and the Pollack-Krasner Foundation.
LECTURE
March 4, 7 p.m. Free Public lecture at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, cash bar 6p.m.
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is one of the leading institutions for contemporary art in the country. Located at 3750 Washington Boulevard in Grand Center, the museum offers six to eight exhibitions each year, presenting works by artists at the forefront of the regional, national and international art scene. The Contemporary is open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thursdays 10 a.m.-7 p.m., and Sundays 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Admission is $5 for adults, $3 for seniors and students (with ID), FREE for children 12 and under. The museum is free on Thursdays. Friends of the museum receive FREE admission all year long. To join the museum as a Friend, call 314-535-4660; or visit the Contemporary online at
www.contemporarystl.org.
For more information, please contact:
Susan Werremeyer, Director of Development and Communications
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Tel: 314-535-0770 x213
Fax: 314-535-1226
E-mail: susan.werremeyer@contemporarystl.org
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