Blind Stream, 2008
Yun-Fei Ji, detail from “Water Rising,” 2006, Mineral pigments and ink on mulberry paper.
季雲飛出生和成長於文化大革命時期，兩歲時就與父母分離，在杭州附近的集體農場生活，沒有電視和廣播，他的童年就在祖母講的鬼怪故事和童話中度過。季雲飛在中央美術學院學習了傳統中國繪畫技巧，隨後又於1986年前往美國繼續深造。按照季雲飛自己的話來說，他是運用山水畫來探索從過去的集體主義到現在消費主義的中國曆史的烏托邦夢想。
在新作品中，季雲飛延續了借用曆史與當代連接的方式，重訪民間文學的寶庫，將蒲鬆齡筆下的鬼怪精靈重現於當代社會背景之中。
季雲飛於2005年獲得美國羅馬學院頒發的羅馬獎，成為獲得該獎項的第一位中國人，並於當年簽約了James Cohan畫廊，他的作品也已被MOMA收藏。
門外的陌生人季雲飛
季雲飛是一個典型的慢人，說話慢、畫畫慢、成名慢。他是少年神童，但比師兄徐冰成名晚了10 多年。在美國定居21 年，他的慢積澱出不一樣的東西來，2005 年，他成為美國羅馬學院百年曆史上第一個獲得羅馬獎的中國人。這次，他的兩幅藝術單品回國參展。他的回國展覽比早已從美國殺回來的徐冰整整晚了7 年。
文/ 丁曉蕾 攝影/ 小武
“上海藝術博覽會國際當代藝術展”現場，紐約詹姆士?科恩畫廊(JamesCohan)的展品在無聲地表明自己的身價。畫廊門口站著Video 藝術之父白南準的作品。這個著名的裝置作品《電視花園》像一名脾氣古怪的迎賓員，身上裝著十來台電視機注視著來來往往的過客。而抽象派英格雷德?卡蘭、 視像裝置藝術先驅比爾?維爾拉、德國大師演維姆?文德斯的攝影作品也成為鎮店之寶。
畫廊左側全部讓給了一個陌生的中國人——季雲飛。
兩幅出自季雲飛之手的水墨畫，跟光怪陸離的裝置和油畫相比，保守古舊、格格不入。
跑過去向畫廊市場總監邵希亞(Arthur Solway)打聽作者是誰的多半是中國人，而老外則去問價錢。在另一家紐約CRG 畫廊展出的華人藝術家張歐告訴記者：“現在，Yun-Fei Ji 這個名字在美國叫得很響。”
“Yun-Fei Ji”是季雲飛的英文名字。
海外出名，中國陌生
拿國際著名策展人巫鴻的話來說，季雲飛就是一介書生。在藝術展熱火朝天進行時，他還在紐約的畫室做自己的作品。
“我是個慢性子。”電話那頭的季雲飛一字一句地說。
1986 年，季雲飛移居美國。1987 年，穀文達、蔡國強移居美國和日本,1991年，徐冰移居美國。在展覽上，同期出國的徐冰、穀文達的作品身價已經高他許多倍，季雲飛的長卷《Water Rising》售價為13.5 萬美元。
季雲飛坦白地說：“看別人出名自己也羨慕，也想好好辦個大展，但沒辦法，隻能把自己的事兒做好，慢慢來吧。”紐約著名的現當代美術館MoMA收藏了他的兩幅作品，此前，被MoMA收藏作品的中國藝術家有蔡國強、徐冰、方力均等四位。最近，MoMA 的人找到季雲飛，要為他出一本畫冊。
直到2002 年，季雲飛才開始為美國藝術界所知。當年的惠特尼雙年展是他在美國第一次重要的公開亮相。此後，季雲飛參加的展覽越來越多。
2005 年是季雲飛的轉變之年。他獲得了美國羅馬學院頒發的羅馬獎。羅馬學院是西方各國設立在羅馬的藝術學院。著名畫家德加、安格爾等都曾在羅馬學院學習過。美國羅馬學院成立於1904 年，已有百年曆史，季雲飛是迄今為止第一個獲得羅馬獎的中國人。
這一年，季雲飛轉簽紐約一流的詹姆士?科恩畫廊。 科恩畫廊成立於1999 年，主要經營已成名的和正嶄露頭角的國際當代藝術家的作品。當年的畫廊開幕展就出手不凡，展出了吉爾伯特和喬治的早期藝術作品。季雲飛是畫廊代理的唯一的華人藝術家。
而在中國，季雲飛幾乎不為人知。出現在“上海當代”現場的這兩幅畫，是他第一次在中國展出。當記者換成中文名字搜索他時，連一份完整的畫家簡曆也搜不到。
新一代老怪
一次，一位朋友特地跑去展覽現場看季雲飛的作品，回來後告訴他，根本沒看到他的畫。“我的畫很容易被忽略，”季雲飛笑著說， “我不喜歡畫那種給人視覺衝擊力很強的畫，我希望讓人慢慢讀出畫中的故事。”
季雲飛的畫黃黃的、舊舊的，連他自己都說是“爛紙舊畫”。在2006 年的作品《The Dead Can Still Dance》裏，山上的樹林裏隱藏著獸麵人身的妖怪，透明的鬼魂和骷髏若隱若現，仿佛山林中在開一場盛大的死亡宴會。
在表現三峽移民的作品《Last DaysBefore The Flood》裏， 季雲飛使用典型中國山水畫的布局，畫麵都是山林和河水，但現代建築物間出其中，大都是中國鄉村的二層小樓，隻是屋裏街道都空無一人；畫麵的左下角有三五個人在趕路。顯然，他們是最後一批離開村子的人。同樣畢業於中央美院，留學美國，季雲飛與師兄 “海外四大天王”之一的徐冰走的是完全相反的道路。徐冰比季雲飛大12 歲，學水墨畫，出國之後完全轉向了觀念藝術，他的成名作《天書》都是大尺寸，有擴張性、政治性的。而季雲飛出國後反而更加珍視起中國的傳統，不玩觀念，不做裝置，索性開始一筆一畫地畫起水墨畫來。
1991 年，徐冰到美第一年就在威斯康星州文維姆美術館舉辦了個人展覽，而季雲飛直到2001 年才在紐約布魯克林pierogi 畫廊舉辦個展。
季雲飛堅持著自己的興趣，選擇了一條通向成名的最慢的道路。就算是一直關注美國華人藝術家變遷、對美國藝術圈很熟悉的巫鴻，也是通過惠特尼雙年展才知道季雲飛。“有人說他在美國出名靠畫國畫，但想想看，畫國畫的人實在太多了，要出名實在太難了。”
巫鴻說： “他的畫古怪，有夢幻色彩，並非表麵的水墨畫，而是融合了很多西方超現實的概念，比如西班牙戈雅的傳統；還有，我在他身上看到了過去揚州八怪的影子。他很像石濤和羅聘。”同是經曆過“文革”時期的一代人，季雲飛的感受不會比徐冰、穀文達少。季雲飛在作品中創造了一套屬於他自己的繪畫語言，鬼怪、靈魂都是他的語言符號，他用比喻的方式把傳統和前衛的東西結合起來。同時，他在作品中展現的都是中國曆史中的重要事件，除了三峽移民，還涉及鴉片戰爭、義和團運動、河流環保等近現代中國的曆史事件。2002 年，他創作的三峽移民係列，成為他被紐約藝術圈認可的代表作品。季雲飛畫畫非常慢。他喜歡在畫上表現層次感，加入很多隱藏的元素，畫一幅畫要琢磨很久，一幅畫動不動就要花上兩三個月的時間。近年來逐漸有了影響力之後，買畫的人越來越多，但他還是保持著自己畫畫的速度。宣紙薄，經不起折騰，有時畫到最後一下子破了，就一切再從頭開始。低產讓他錯過了很多展覽機會，“畫廊的人也挺著急的，不過也沒辦法。”季雲飛說。
隱居紐約的中國民間藝人
季雲飛，北京人，生於1963 年，媽媽是知青，父親是隨軍醫生，他從小在杭州的軍區大院長大。
季雲飛繪畫中的很多元素都可以從他的童年找到源頭。有一段時間他被送去跟鄉下的外婆同住，聽外婆講鬼故事就成了每天最好的娛樂。在季雲飛的作品中，人物總是麵無表情，若隱若現，仿佛鬼魂一般，源於童年時對鬼故事的迷戀。長大後，他讀《聊齋誌異》，很欣賞其中充滿人性的鬼的形象，他說，“通過死去的魂靈討論生者，這是個好辦法。”在“文革”時期軍區大院長大的季雲飛保持了少年的敏感和反叛。他早早地顯露了繪畫天賦。10 歲時，母親送他到一個專門畫軍事訓練示意圖的軍官那裏學畫。“文革”結束高考恢複，年僅15 歲的他考入中央美院油畫係，19歲大學畢業，被周圍的人視為“神童”。“我在一個什麽都講究快速進步的環境中長大，”季雲飛說，“我的父輩們熱情非常高漲，希望在很短的時間內趕超英美，但之後‘文革’等事件的發生讓他們非常失落。”
當時的中央美院還在蘇聯畫派的籠罩之下，而老師們反複畫領袖像的行為讓季雲飛覺得無趣，也許是因為少年的叛逆，在大三那年，季雲飛的興趣更多地轉向了中國傳統繪畫和書法篆刻，尤其喜歡以陳老蓮為首的明末“四大怪傑”。快畢業時，季雲飛跟著老師一起去敦煌寫生。莫高窟講述佛經故事的壁畫和佛像深深地打動他，回北京之後，他也采用類似的敘述方式、。這一次旅行，改變了他後來的創作道路。
1986 年，在北京工藝美校教書的季雲飛獲得了阿卡薩斯大學的富布萊特獎學金資助，赴美留學。碩士畢業之後，季雲飛到了紐約，在一些朋友的幫助下安頓下來，他一直獲得各種學院和基金會的支持，生活過得雖不富裕，但卻支撐得下去。
沒有生存的壓力，讓季雲飛更加專心地發展自己的繪畫。多年的紐約生活也影響了季雲飛的創作風格。季雲飛承認比利時靜物名家讓?勃呂蓋爾以至美國地下 大師羅伯特?克魯博對自己的影響。
另外，季雲飛還受到文學作品的啟發，從曹雪芹、白居易，到波蘭裔英國作家約瑟夫?康拉德等，他還喜歡維姆?文德斯和科恩兄弟的電影。大事件下的小人物、他們的生存狀態，成為季雲飛的興趣所在。影響季雲飛最深的，還是中國傳統的民間文化，不論是繪畫還是傳說、故事、音樂，“我甚至以為自己就是個民間藝人。”季雲飛說。
現在，季雲飛住在紐約布魯克林一個新興的藝術家聚集地。 季雲飛喜歡自己在紐約的生存狀態，周圍都是來自世界各地的藝術家，他每時每刻都能感受到不同文化的碰撞。他甚至在爵士樂中攫取靈感，在去三峽考察期間，他帶著畫筆畫紙，走到哪畫到哪，“這是即興創作，就像爵士樂裏的即興部分。”季雲飛希望能在不久之後回國辦個展，他說：“等有了合適的機會，慢慢來吧。”
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006/12/art/yun-fei
Yun-Fei Ji with John Yau
by John Yau and Yun-Fei Ji
Photo of the artist by Phong Bui.During his brief visit to New York for his first one-person exhibit at James Cohan Gallery, “Water that Floats the Boat Can Also Sink It: New Work by Yun- Fei Ji”, which will be on view till December 22, the artist came to visit Rail’s art editor John Yau to talk about his new body of work.
John Yau (Rail): Did you make all the work in your show at James Cohan Gallery during your stay in England?
Yun-Fei Ji: Most of the work actually got started while I was in Rome on my Prix de Rome fellowship last year. Then with the last piece, Water Rising, which is a long horizontal piece that has two panels that meet in the corner, it was started in Rome and got finished in London. In fact, the first two attempts didn’t quite work out, but I managed to pull through in the last one. The reason for this was simply in the early conception of Water Rising, the group of displaced people who are carrying their belongings was initially on the left of the bottom area. So I moved them to the right in the first panel and likewise in the second, from right to left, and they eventually meet and disappear into the wall.
Rail: Because it is a corner piece that almost mirrors itself in terms of how the images are read.
Ji: Right. In the early version I painted just people as silhouettes against an empty background, and I was hoping, by describing what they carry with them, it would say something about each of the characters. So I did a lot of sketches, which were based on my archives of digital photos that I took of the people in their villages from my trips to China over the years. In the second version I felt I was being too heavy-handed, but in the last I was finally able to make it in a way that sometimes the people would disappear into the landscape, while other times you see the littered landscape of the area where they were taking and putting things in their baskets; what they couldn’t take with them they had to leave there, by the side of the road, and the scavengers would come and collect the abandoned things, in order to reuse or sell them. The torn-down houses enhance the whole scene, which adds to the feeling of desperation.
Rail: You are talking about a massive relocation that involves a few million people.
Ji: Anywhere from 1.5 to 1.9 million people from an area with about a 500-kilometer radius, there are about a thousand villages and about three fairly large and old cities. You know the villages and cities on the Yangtze River, where there is a long history: it used to go through Sichuan province and the only route to get there is by taking a boat upstream for hundreds of miles; it’s a very mountainous area. The Yangtze River is one of the longest rivers in the world. It starts from the Tibetan plateau, melting ice coming down to Sichuan province and Chongqing, one of the three largest cities in China, and then comes downstream into the Three Gorges area bordering the Sichuan and Hubei provinces in the west, the central part of China, where it has a thousand twists and turns and the riverbed becomes very narrow. That was why, a hundred years ago, people were already thinking of building a dam there. Mao in fact was thinking of having hydroelectric power developed in that area and the government is still working on it right now.
Rail: And that’s going to be finished in 2009?
Ji: 2009, yeah. But the water now has risen to 175 meters, and the first time I visited this area they were in the process of dismantling the cities.
Rail: when did you first go there?
Ji: 2001 or 2002
Rail: And when did the project itself start?
Ji: The physical construction began in 1990.
Rail: Did they build cities for the people to move to?
Yun-Fei Ji, “The Scholars Flee in Horror” (2006). Courtesy of artist and gallery.Ji: Yes, there are immigrant cities that are higher up in the mountains. So, if you have a city resident card and you move to “the cities,” you get compensated according to the size of the apartment or house you previously owned. They would give you a certain amount of money, which allows you to relocate and buy an apartment in the immigrant cities. Or if you are from the village, you will be relocated all across China, which could be a thousand miles away.
Rail: So the villagers had to suffer more than the townspeople. This whole project would break up the villagers’ traditional family system.
Ji: Yes, for generations. You know, villagers had to dig up their ancestors’ graves and take their bones with them; it’s quite sad.
Rail: Ghosts in China are very different than ghosts in America or in the West. You said that they coexist with the living in a very real way.
Ji: Yeah, when I was growing up in a village with my grandmother, because there was no television, no radio, and no films, she would tell me all kinds of ghost stories and legends that are basically parts of the oral tradition, storytelling, which is still very much alive among many people in China, particularly if they live in a village. For example, the legend of Lui Jai Ji Yi has a different folk spirit, but given so much humanity, she is free to speak her mind. That’s why ghosts are the most popular vehicles for substituting what people can express in such a tightly controlled society where you, the living, can’t say it.
Rail: And in a way you are implying that the three Gorges Dam Project is disturbing all the ghosts or bodies that have inhabited that region.
Ji: But it’s also the idea of modernity, which kind of wipes everything out. So ghosts and other local legends are slowly disappearing as a result.
Rail: That is a big issue with China; everything has to be changed in such a hurry so they can catch up with modernity. I mean the Three Gorges wasn’t a pilgrimage site, but primarily for enlightenment.
Ji: Every child in China who reads a story about coming down the Yangtze River through the Three Gorges, knows about all the legends, and can recite all those poems; but this is the area they are going to change. Archeologically, it was quickly organized by the government to dig up and keep as many things as possible before the flood. They even built a museum for it, but there are so many remnants, it was just impossible to recover everything in such a short period of time. It’s a very unfortunate situation.
Rail: Increasingly, that’s what we hear about, how China doesn’t know what to do with the past.
Ji: As a child growing up in China, you would learn the modern history of China. It began with the opium wars, which initiated our long struggle against the West and colonialism; it was very brutal, humiliating, and eventually led to unfair treaties where Hong Kong was leased to England for a hundred years.
Rail: So it’s a history of overcoming humiliation?
Ji: Yeah. Because you are living under the imposed rule of western powers, you kind of have to internalize all of that in order to catch up, and be modern. Otherwise you’ll be cut into pieces. Most people seem to think that our long and invested tradition in Taoist or Confucius ideas led to this horrible state of affairs. That’s why, when Mao came to power, he said we needed to have modernization, we needed to have the state, and that all these countries in the West were trying to threaten us. The people rallied behind him until the Cultural Revolution disillusioned them. Everyone realized that we needed a change in everything, including the government.
Rail: Do you think that living through the Cultural Revolution as a child had a profound effect on you and your family?
Ji: Undoubtedly yes, though my family was luckier than others. At the same time maybe some of this message, Mao’s idea of rebellion, or of disregarding authority, helped get people to think for themselves.
Rail: So the Cultural Revolution also had a reverse effect, and got people to distrust the government. I know that many people, at least two generations, couldn’t and didn’t go to school for years. Is that what happened to you?
Ji: We were running wild for about eight or nine years. It was terrible.
Rail: Ha Jin, the writer, told me a story about how, when he was stationed in Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, they would get armed with sticks and cross the border and fight Russian soldiers for fun. All the soldiers in his group were teenagers around fifteen or sixteen, I believe. And this was the way they passed their time.
Ji: By the time Mao died in 1976 and Deng Xiaoping came to power, we were exhausted from the political struggle and endless meetings. People just got fed up with the subsequent corruptions. It was a very disturbing time.
Rail: Your family was taken apart right?
Ji: Yeah, and my mother was kind of in trouble for a while.
Rail: But at this same time, you went to the Academy where you were trained under the program of Socialist Realism via the Soviet Union. It must have been strange to see artists who had been rehabilitated, allowed to paint for the first time probably in years, who are your teachers, who are afraid to paint anything other than what they are supposed to paint.
Ji: They were products of the 1930s, they had a lot of progressive ideas, they developed their own language, but when the Cultural Revolution started they were all sent away to the factories and the farms so they were deprived of their own work as artists. So when they came back they were in their fifties and they were our teachers in school. Some of them were able to make new work, because when Deng Xiaoping came to power, he hadn’t yet drawn a line and said, “There is the boundary.”
Rail: So everything was possible for a while, but when Xiaoping drew the boundaries of what you are suppose to do in 1982, ’83, with reference to the anti-spiritual pollution, what happened then?
Ji: That was sort of a wake up call to all of us. Once again, we became disillusioned just like before.
Rail: But there was a brief moment in the late 70s where Chinese painting seemed to be starting to develop into a new direction. And then in the early 80s it all got shut down again. Were you still in school then?
Ji: I actually graduated and then quickly went to teach in Beijing.
Rail: Is that where you learn about classical Chinese painting?
Ji: Yeah, I had some colleagues who were doing calligraphy, and also because of my early visits to old Buddhist sites while I was still in school. I went to Tibet, and we did a lot of copying of those beautiful Tangka paintings, which depict hundreds of years of Buddhist art from the period of mid-16th century. So it was a combination of both that finally led me to study and pay more attention to classical Chinese painting.
Rail: So you went on a trip to Tibet, what was that like and how old were you?
Ji: I was eighteen. I went with a friend and two of our teachers. One of them was in Tibet for twenty years. He was sent there to be rehabilitated, so while we were there, he had a lot of Tibetan artisans visit him and we were drinking together a lot. They took us to visit Jokang, the third largest temple in Tibet.
Rail: So even, say, in China, during this moment of the melting of the ice, there is this other culture within the very structured society of artists and that culture is a little bit outside the mainstream, I mean there is obvious communication because this teacher has been rehabilitated but he has Tibetan students, so then something else happens, information gets passed around below the surface.
Ji: Yeah that’s true. My teacher did a lot of beautiful charcoal drawings of Tibetans, I remember when I was a kid I would copy them. Otherwise most other things were very stylized propaganda work in which you had to follow the proper hierarchy. So I was happy to study with him. Also, the drawings are part of what they did. It was the result of the time they spent with Tibetan farmers. The drawings were more fresh, and more interesting than the paintings, which they’d spent months working on in the studio, because they had to represent history in a certain way.
Rail: Because they had to idealize everything.
Ji: The first and most important story is of the Communist Party member, the leader had to be in the center with his supporting casts surrounding him, then the farmer and so on. Everyone was assigned a place within the painting, and it all depended on your status within or outside the Communist Party.
Rail: A hierarchy where the intellectual is at the bottom (laughs). And you are aware of all those codes and symbolic structures in Chinese classical painting which also exist in socialist-realism, and you were saying earlier that when you were in Rome you were interested in the hierarchy of Christian iconography for the same reason: Christ in the center and all other beings surrounding him. One of the ways you seem to look at art is to see that there’s a symbolic structure that is used as a scaffold to hold the information. For example in the big vertical piece, Below the 143 Meter Watermark, you pointed out that people are going only so high up on the mountain, as if the mountain is really the symbol of the government.
Ji: Of course, the farmers are the people with no voice at all. Even though in the Chinese system, there is such thing as petition, where, if they were abused, they can go to high government officials to petition. But that process can take years for the officials even to look at the case. And most of them are too poor to go through that agony. Some have and ended up losing everything. Thinking about their struggle with the government’s hierarchy and corruption, I went back to study the great paintings of the Sung period, where the institution of landscape painting was actually established. And according to their values, the main mountain represented the central sovereign power and the supporting mountains bow down to it depending on the ranking systems. So the reference does have some connotations of a hierarchical basis.
Rail: So in your own way, you are taking some of those structures and redoing them with a certain subtext that undermines them. At the same time, you reconstruct the space to address a new pictorial requirement, which is up against the surface of the picture plane, while allowing some depth to exist. As a result, the viewer feels this contradiction just as much as the people in the painting: they can’t go up the mountain; it’s like they are stuck where they are. Yet again, like scroll painting, you’re moving through and with the landscape.
Ji: Yes, that’s how I do my work as well. When I travel, I paint. I move from one little section to the next. The large sheets of paper are folded and refolded, and I work on small parts.
Rail: But in your head you must have some sense of how it will go together.
Ji: Very roughly, and it’s a long process. I spend weeks and weeks on a piece, and sometimes it would take one bad part, which may lead me to discard the whole thing. Other times I have to stay with it in order to bring some unexpected clarity to the piece. Even though I kind of work back and forth. But it’s impossible to simultaneously work in all these areas, so what I tend to do is work on one section, almost finish it, and then move onto another section.
Rail: In this new body of work, it seems to me that the scale has changed dramatically. These are the biggest paintings you have done so far, right?
Ji: Yeah, for this show I had the idea of really using the physical scale in relation to the body. For instance, when you look at a mountain, you’re looking from the bottom up. And sometimes the reverse happens. Ultimately your vision is unclear about what you’re looking at.
Rail: That’s true.
Ji: You can see similarly in the corner piece where we have the people walking from two directions, I deliberately painted them low, eye-level, so you can’t really look at all the details. In other words, you are aware that you are looking at one section of the painting while other things are moving at the same time. You kind of see one panel on the left wall, people moving from one direction, while you are looking at a group of people moving to another direction, on the right panel. Again, it’s all happening kind of simultaneously.
Rail: So you wanted simultaneity in that piece, in a sense that it’s much larger than you can even see or experience.
Ji: Yes. I imagine that there would be two people looking at one section at a time, usually from right to left on one side, and one side from left to right. And since they’re all opened up and coming together the corner wall, I felt that they should have a physical locality and the height that I intended.
Rail: But as far as the narrative aspect is concerned, your work doesn’t quite follow that tradition exactly. It is a narrative of desperation in a way. I mean there are ghosts in the form of people taking their whole lives with them. A certain internal migration, perhaps?
Ji: An internal migration and an abandonment of all these things. Another part that is important to me, which has never happened before, is this sort of industrial scale of moving people that has been orchestrated by the government.
Rail: Yeah, one and a half million people. That’s a huge number.
Ji: And the landscape is vast.
Rail: Can you talk a bit about your drawing?
Ji: For me, drawing is a way to get a hold of the detail that was important. Especially with this project, since these are fairly big pieces it’s necessary that they can defer to the drawings. And I don’t mind that. I sort of wanted to be a little bit more removed from the whole process.
Rail: You wanted to be more objective and less overtly satirical. Whereas, in the earlier work, there is a kind of grotesqueness to some of these figures, these new ones seem less so. Anyway, you said at one point that you were influenced by the German expressionists like George Grosz and Otto Dix. In what way do you relate to their work?
Ji: I like their work in a formal sense, the way they construct the figure with a certain Expressionistic pathos and contempt for their social and political conditions. Though in my work, the figures are portrayed more or less in despair and lost in their environment, which in this case, the surrounding landscape that connects to a long history in traditional Chinese painting as well as its culture. So there’s a sense of affection I have for them. If I want to describe a learned person in this very rustic landscape, there would always be some bamboos near him to indicate that he was the learned figure. It’s kind of hidden, but here and there you can see a fisherman, or a poet.
Rail: You had spoken about the tradition of the poet in relationship to the emperor, the poet being the one who can speak or write to authority.
Ji: From early on, the poet had an official post—he goes through the countryside and collects folk songs from the people; these songs reflected the true feelings of the people, like their complaints. The emperor had to do something to fix it, to correct his behavior and policy. So by the Hung dynasty I like that the poet had such power; but if he criticized the emperor too much, then the emperor got upset and sent him away to some remote province. So he became very angry, the poet.
Rail: So that’s the tradition you see yourself in some way. Do you think that the Misty poets, like Bei Dao, had to be indirect before they came to the West? You know the poets of post culture revolution, that first generation?
Ji: Yeah, very much like that.
Rail: Yeah, the Zigzag poets of the more recent tradition. The ones who stayed in China, the most recent generation, seem to be trying to find ways of being critical of the government and their society, but they have to do it in very round about ways. The whole thing with China, (we’ve talked about this,) is that everything has to be read between the lines.
Rail: There is a whole tradition of the commentators on the paintings, the commentators on the poets who develop or write on the painting that’s not equal to the painting. So when you say you’re trying to be more descriptive, you’re trying to be less directive. You’re not telling us how to read this.
Ji: No, not at all. It’s more about looking than anything else.
