The work of Chinese artist Jia, a trained architect who has also studied Chinese literature and calligraphy, comprises painting as well as photography and performance. In her painting series The Chinese Version, Jia juxtaposes industrial typography with painterly skill, meaning with appearance, and a memory of literature’s flamboyance with formalistic visuality. On large-scale canvases she paints Chinese characters using always the same sans-serif typeface which was designed shortly after printing presses came to use in China and Japan and which “evokes the mechanization of products ‘perfectly’ made by machine” Jia, The Stillness as a Chinese Jar, 2013, available online at the artist’s website. She puts her mostly black types on white ground, invoking the paper they are usually printed upon, but as she carries them out laboriously by hand she translates the industrial types into painted figures. Unlike their printed pendants, the symbols in her paintings form horizontal or vertical lines, often establishing grids or patterns, without following a syntactic structure or even a semantic logic. Rather, Jia assembles the characters according to their visual characteristics, letting their inner formal structure, the density and arrangement of their strokes, or the similarities between their overall shapes determine the way they are spread across the canvas.

Not only to a Western audience will many of the symbols in Jia’s paintings remain illegible. Chinese viewers, or else: readers, might also experience gaps in understanding as quite a number of the characters are not in common use today. During the 1950s, in the run-up to China’s Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong issued a Character Simplification Program the changes of which are in effect – and legally enforced – until today. Two-thirds of the characters that had evolved over centuries were banned from official use while the remaining types were simplified, the number of their strokes reduced, allegedly to enhance the country’s literacy rate. Many traditional characters had been composed of several distinct parts that combined iconographic or ideographic elements with sound-related and etymological information. As many of these structural components were reduced to only a few strokes, their icono-/ideographic nature was lost and the etymological relations between them were often obscured. The amount and complexity of characters in use being significantly reduced, a rich tradition of Chinese literature and philosophy was lost to many, possibly quite in accordance with the goals of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.Cf. Drew Hammond, The Chinese Version, in: TEXT-Revue, 12, 2014, pp. 30-38

Opposing the restriction of expression and thought she understands to be the ongoing effect of the Character Simplification ProgramIn a statement on The Chinese Version on her website the artist writes that the Simplification Program “not only restricted expression, but also, to a degree, it restricted the ability to conceive certain ideas”., Jia in her paintings uses both, officially sanctioned types and extinguished traditional characters. To emphasize the partly icono-/ideographic nature of the Chinese script and to juxtapose its former abundance with its present functionality she frequently plays on the impression of similarity and affiliation between characters. One group of paintings uses simple figures of just a few geometrically aligned strokes that in their abstract seriality make think of grids and diagrams as are associated with Western Conceptual Art. Whether it is a symbol that to Western eyes looks like a Latin letter T and its bottom up counterpart or a group of dashes lining up to form a spiral – what seems to be mere variations of the same figure is in fact one widely used Chinese character placed side by side with a completely unrelated, only long forgotten, symbol. At other times, characters appear to emerge from one another – as a whole and its fragments or as doubles and multiplications of the same. Suggesting a possibly structural connection between characters of similar appearance, Jia raises questions of semantic and etymological relations and thus of the historicity of language.

The implied concurrence of visual and semantic similarity is taken even further in two triptychs that use the Chinese characters of the numbers one, two, and three – consisting simply of one, two, or three horizontal strokes. One work alternates the symbols in a steady rhythm of 1-2-3-2-1, the other moves them closer together, dissolving the strokes into a diffuse texture. In the central panels of both triptychs characters of the same density are placed below each other, creating a static verticality, while in the wings they shift inwards, causing diagonal movements toward the center. Visual and semantic levels here are interlocked. The Chinese numeric symbols are ideographic, depicting the count they signify. Formally as well as semantically, they grow one out of the other as the three mathematically and visually can be split into ones. Yet expanded is this idea by the form of the triptych that is at once one and three pictures.

The triptychs’ change between verticality in the center and movement in the wings points to another aspect of the series: Jia frequently uses the variation of densely and more lightly drawn characters to create optical effects; and she includes the space that surrounds the painting into the logic of the characters’ arrangement and the effects arising from it. Only when stepping back from the canvas one fully perceives the hidden patterns and figures and only with the viewers’ movement the figures are set in motion. Straight lines begin to drop or to curve, groups of characters swell into waves making the canvas seem to bulge and curl. To achieve such effects Jia makes use of very small formal variations. She arranges sequences of characters that gradually grow from having just a few simple strokes into more and more dense and complex symbols. She repeats and reverses the sequences, shifts them slightly from one line to the next, or contrasts only two characters to produce trompe l’oeil figures.

The optical illusions of bulging canvases and hidden images, and their counting on the viewers’ movement, might initially call to mind 1960s Op Art that, to emphasize visual perception, experimented with ways to irritate the eye, using flickering lines, inversions, and afterimages. Many Op Art works – from Victor Vasarely’s zebras to Marina Apollonio’s spinning discs – use the contrast of black-and-white to enhance their optical effects. This is true also for most of Jia’s paintings but in her case already results from painting typographical symbols while Op Art uses mostly geometrical shapes. Accordingly, Jia’s Chinese Version shares most with those art works in the context of Op Art – or more generally: Concrete Art – that cover the canvas with a grid of small distinct shapes, linear and at times vaguely resembling typographic figures. Italian artist Edoardo Landi, e.g., drew in his 1960s series Struttura Visuale thin-lined crosses that made the white gaps glow between them. Also François Morellet, co-founder of the Parisian Groupe de recherche d’art visuel (GRAV), had an “affinity to ornamental, canvas-covering textures”Sonja Klee, Humor und Ironie in der Konkreten Kunst von François Morellet, Künzelsau: Swiridoff, 2012, p. 46 (translation by the author), creating modular and repetitive patterns and grids of short lines such as his Trames de tirets 0-90°. Travelling to Brazil in the 1950s, he had become acquainted with the work of Swiss designer and artist Max Bill, father figure of Concrete Art, whose appearance at the São Paulo Biennial in 1951 had influenced a young generation of Latin-American artists. Like Josef Albers, whose black-and-white spacial perspectives were to influence Op Art, Max Bill was a teacher at Bauhaus before he co-founded the Ulm School of Design where he developed his principles of Concrete Art.

Jia, as is mandatory for all architecture students in China, extensively studied Bauhaus graphics, design, and architecture. Nonetheless, Concrete Art, which resists symbolism or being based (like abstraction) on observed reality but aims at designing a surface out of its own formal and geometric rulesCf. Max Bill, “konkrete kunst” (introduction), in: exh. cat. zürcher konkrete kunst, Stuttgart 1949., might at first seem a bold comparison to Jia’s work. After all, her The Chinese Version arranges characters of script, which by definition represent reality, and even emphasizes their icono-/ideographic nature, i.e. their being evolved from reality rather than from abstract thought. However, highlighting the formal similarities her work shares with the patterns and grids in the spirit of Concretism illustrates that Jia’s emphasis on the ideographic nature of the Chinese script is countered by a strong interest in the design of the surface. As she strips the symbols of their syntactic function, reducing them to structural components of her compositions, geometric principles seem in fact to outweigh semantics without, however, ultimately superseding it. Rather, Jia holds up a tension between abstract and ideographic form, between mathematical rules and symbolic representation.

This leads to yet another branch of Concretism: Eugen Gomringer, who was Max Bill’s assistant at the Ulm School of Design, expanded the ideas of Concrete Art to develop a concept of Concrete Poetry. Valuing the signifier over the signified, the poem was to be a presentation of language rather than a representation of reality. Thus, not unlike in Jia’s paintings, the word as the smallest independent unit of meaning (and only sometimes the syllable or letter) turned into a pictorial object and compositional element. Syntax, rhyme, and meter were abandoned; instead, the poem became a spacial arrangement of text that uses the words’ visual appearance on the page as a means of expression. Concrete Poetry as well as Jia’s Chinese Version attenuate linearity and use repetitions and small irritations of otherwise steady sequences to make the beholder conscious of the reading process. Syntax loses its determinative power, giving way to the visual characteristics of the logograms. Much as Concrete Poetry resists representation and emphasizes the materiality of the signs and the page, semantics have never been entirely obliterated but here, too, the entanglement of semantic and visual levels remains essential.

Remarkably enough, Gomringer in his preface to an anthology of Concrete Poetry not only credits Mallarmé but also refers to 19th century sinologist Ernest Fenollosa whose essay The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry valued the ideographic nature of the Chinese script and already spoke of “concrete poetry”Cf. Eugen Gomringer’s introduction to konkrete poesie, Stuttgart: Reclam, 1972. Working as a professor and culture official in Japan, Fenollosa strived to foster the exchange between Western and Eastern cultural traditions. His essay had a great influence on American poet Ezra Pound and the poetry movement of Imagism associated with him as well as on subsequent movements that sought a direct, sensuous connection between form and content. “With Fenollosa, a sensuous-tangible energy that in the West had long been forgotten was recovered in the language of poetry.”Udo Kultermann, Wo es weder Westen noch Osten gibt. Ernest Fenollosas Bedeutung für die Kulturentwicklung der Moderne, in: Merkur, 12, 1993, pp. 1101-1104, citation: p. 1104. (translation by the author)

Fenollosa’s overly strong emphasis of the Chinese script’s ideographic nature has long been criticized by sinologists. Nevertheless, the connection between Chinese script and Western concrete poetry was made and has since produced numerous cooperations that would certainly have pleased Fenollosa. One of them, a double exhibition in the 1990s, introduced German speaking concrete poets to an audience in Japan while their Japanese colleagues presented their work in Hamburg. In the accompanying catalogue the Japanese artists repeatedly stress the influence calligraphy had on their work, an art form that traditionally uses the style of writing, deviations from the conventional stroke order as well as the text’s composition on the paper to support the poem’s structure, mood, and content (which, incidentally, has been greatly impaired by the Chinese Character Simplification Program)Hammond 2014, op. cit. (note 2). As Jia has likewise studied calligraphy, it may not be surprising to find in the catalogue works by Japanese concrete poets that resemble her approach and even one that arranges, formally quite similar to Chinese Version, characters in a grid across the page.

Random as these finds may be, they cast light on one point: While Jia’s painting series clearly draws on her own cultural tradition, she also touches on ideas that have shaped Western art and literature over the past century such as the attempts to integrate art and life and dissolve the boundaries between the arts. This makes it, far beyond being a comment on Chinese language, its history and officially enforced simplification, meaningful also for a Western audience.

Jia (b. 1979) is an artist who lives and works in Berlin. She was born in Beijing in the People’s Republic of China where she studied architecture, performance and literature. In this interview she reflects on her development as an artist, the problems of translating artistic practice between differing cultural contexts and the intended critical significance of her work, which combines aspects of contemporary western(ized) art with interpretations of traditional Chinese thought and practice.

Paul Gladston: I would like to begin by asking you to say something about the background to your development as an artist. You have had a very varied training in dance, architecture and garden design as well as an involvement with independent cinema. In what ways has your varied training and experience impacted on your work as an artist?

Jia: My father is a surgeon, and my mother is a pharmacist who also works in a hospital. At least once a month, they were both called to work shifts on the same night. So, on those nights, from the time I was four I was left to stay at home alone. Because they were so busy at work, they gave me a box of chalk besides other toys. I drew on the floor with the chalk, and after that I would clean the floor. I think this was the beginning of my interest in art. At the age of six, in 1985, I started to learn Chinese ink painting mostly by myself, though sometimes my father taught me. At twelve, my parents sent me to a weekend art school especially for students preparing for the exam to enter the Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) in Beijing. Since my parents were divorcing, they thought to send me away on weekends; this was much better than to have me at home while they were fighting. For almost three years, I studied Western drawing and painting. The art classes were held in the basement of CAFA, so we called it the ‘underground class’. At that time being an artist meant being poor and living on dreams. Every year CAFA gave only thirty places in response to more than a thousand applicants. Some tried for more than ten years, but you were not allowed to apply to university after the age of 25, so they had to change their ID cards in order to fake their ages. You can imagine how much they loved art, and tried their best. I remember clearly some of them came from very poor villages. They had no money for breakfast, so they drank lots of hot water to keep their body warm in winter. Most of the artists of our generation still remember that ‘underground class’, and still remember that art meant more to us than it does to students nowadays.

The only reason I did not go to CAFA like many of my friends and classmates, was because of my parents’ divorce. At that time in China, the tuition fee for universities had just started. We were not that poor, but I knew I had the responsibility to take care of my mother, and I didn’t want her to spend so much on my studies. Although even my grandparents and my father were very good at painting and Chinese calligraphy, they all became physicians and kept to the traditional Chinese literati view that being an artist was not a professional career. I was good at science and technical subjects in high school, so to study architecture was the only choice open to me that would allow me to preserve some relationship to art.

I didn’t go to a good university even though I was one of the top two students from my high school. My family’s problems occupied most of my time, and I didn’t get enough time to study. To cut a long story short, the situation was grave from the start; then later domestic violence totally broke our family and hurt all of us deeply. I wanted to take the university exam again, and go to a better university for my second year, but my mother wouldn’t allow me to do it—I mention this only because it impacts on my art work. So as soon as I entered university, I tried every possibility to attend classes in other universities even though I was not enrolled. These ‘extracurricular’ classes included architecture, philosophy, and literature classes at Peking University, the film theory class at the Beijing Film Academy, and the literature class at CAFA. At the time, there were no open courses online, but I was happily running from one class to another, through all those universities.

When I was twenty, I became a vice-president of The Practice Society (shi jian she 实践社): the first organization dedicated to independent film in China. Later the society was shut down by the government authorities who wished to limit the freedom of making and disseminating independent films. As a general rule, the government tends to place limitations on any media not directly under its control, as you know. Now when I look back, it seems clear that even if the government had not intervened, by now the ideals of the group would have been swallowed up by the huge development of the film industry and its profit-motive; and even by the freedom of new technology and the Internet, which enables everyone to make a movie.

But that was my golden time, in my twenties. I was so lucky to be able to catch the end of the period when young people were still hungry for knowledge, and especially western knowledge after the ending of the Cultural Revolution. I was one of over twenty organizers working together; we got lots of support from all over the country. I think all of us are still very proud of what we did for the Practice Society—not simply because we gave filmmakers such as Jia Zhangke, Lou Ye, and others the first opportunity to show their movies, but because we knew we were doing the right thing to push Chinese film in a new direction. We dreamed of this, a cinema that would not just be for propaganda purposes. We acquired this passion once we got to see masterpieces on pirated DVDs.

Meanwhile, I tried every possibility to come back to art step by step, including through postgraduate study of the literature and history of traditional Chinese opera and drama at the Graduate School of the Chinese National Academy of Art between 2006 and 2008. In order to support myself, I took jobs as an editor, public relations representative, curator, etc. After a while, I had more freedom to choose what I liked. I had been fascinated by traditional opera and modern drama for a long time—and I learned a bit of performance from an opera actor. Besides that I love traditional Chinese literature, especially poems and opera. I recently set up a website for Chinese poetry (Chinese Poems and Lyrics). There is still only a small amount of material on the site, but it will grow. I liked writing and I was not bad at it, so my architecture history professor, ZHANG Bo 张勃 asked me to write a book about classical Chinese gardens with him, Beijing Imperial Gardens Beijing Imperial Gardens (Beijing: Guangming Daily Press, 2004). Besides studying the literature and history of traditional Chinese opera at the Graduate School of the Chinese National Academy of Art, for a while I also studied comparative literature in Peking University.

I now realize that this longstanding interest of mine in Classical Chinese culture—in its visual and literary manifestations—an interest that seems so natural to me, is not the norm for Chinese artists of my generation. I suppose this interest explains why all my works have a basis in traditional paradigms—or at least a consciousness of them—and a sense of loss at their destruction. So thirty years later, I find myself rather as I was at the age of four when I played at drawing with chalk when my parents seemed lost.

PG: You have stated that your work engages with ideas and practice initially developed in western cultural contexts as a means of reinterpreting aspects of Chinese culture. You have also stated that the tension between differing cultural outlooks in your work acts as a generalized locus for criticism of western and Chinese conditions. Could you discuss this further with reference to one of your artworks – for example, the series titled The Chinese Version involving painterly reworkings of simplified Chinese characters. What are you reinterpreting in this particular case and what are the conditions that you are seeking to criticize?

J: I visited Berlin and I found that I liked it, so I moved there in 2009. Since I moved to Berlin, it’s the first time I have felt myself to be an individual; or rather as being so lonely. I had lots of Western friends and even worked in a German architecture studio when I lived in Beijing. But it took months to get used to life in Berlin and its diverse population. Of course the outlooks are different. I remember my friend’s watchdog, the first time we met he was scared of me and ran away because he had never seen an Asian person before. Now every time I go back to China, it also takes time for me to get used to surroundings full of Chinese people.

Speaking of differing cultural outlooks, on the one hand, since moving to Berlin, I feel that I’ve been losing my Chinese language even though I have continued reading Chinese literature every day. On the other hand, English for me is still at the stage of being a simple tool, like a skeleton. Without knowing many vernacular expressions, it is more like a form instead of a rich inner emotion. The simplification of Chinese characters by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1950s—which included the proscription and elimination of two-thirds of Chinese characters from the official lexicon—ostensibly as an attempt to improve communication between people of different classes and levels of education across China, was the greatest destruction of the Chinese language ever. Nowadays, there are less than 10% of traditional Chinese characters left in use in the People’s Republic of China. My work The Chinese Version (ongoing from 2011) presents missing characters mixed with simplified characters in order to remind people of what we have lost, and what we continue to lose today. As an artist, I probably cannot stop the changes; but being an artist is to take responsibility to compel all of us to face the facts so that we can work together for a better result. When I took out the semantic element of the Chinese characters in The Chinese Version the form remains; the overt pattern of the writing seems to suggest that everything is in order, but inside the content is disordered – this also reflects the impact of my suffering in moving between western and Chinese cultures.

PG: Is your work intended to have an impact on society and culture beyond the limits of the institutionalized art world and its audiences? If so, what do you think that impact might be and have you tried to measure it or theorize it in any way?

J: My favourite novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s (di fan nei zao can 第凡內早餐)—not the one by Truman Capote—was written by a Taiwanese woman writer Zhu Tianxin (朱天心). It’s about different attitudes towards the political situation in Taiwan seen from the perspective of two generations of Taiwanese female writers. The older one recalls the period when they joined the democratic movement against martial law in Taiwan and still strongly believes they were right to take the responsibility of the revolution upon their own shoulders no matter the years in prison or the possibility of an even worse end; the younger seems more worldly and shrewd, knowing that to be involved in politics means to risk your life, and if you win you will yield all your victories to someone you do not know at all who becomes the president and does whatever he wants. If you lose, you lose everything. In either case, how can you trust that person, why waste your life for him? I am just between those two generations. In a sense, I agree with both of them.

I once saw an interview with this same writer:

‘Q: Your work has always had a potential as duty, unlike that of which may be of some writers understand there are differences, such as Nabokov made, the purpose of literary creation amuse and entertain only, in order to show the magic of human imagination and creativity, and not to pretend to transform society.
A: I often feel that in the position of novelist, you need to reveal the crisis … I think you must first make a statement regardless of the consequences.
Anger and resentment is the largest source of my writing … I found that many people I once respected have yielded to compromise, surrender, and stagnation. It seems difficult to understand them. So I’m afraid to be a kindly person. If one day, my anger is gone, I might be a happy person, but I could no longer be creative.’

For me that’s that is the beauty of being a writer or artist.

Whenever a plane lands in Beijing, you see the ashy city without a trace of green; only lots of grey residential buildings—even so close to the airport—resembling computer models in rough rendering without the addition of any colours. Imagine, this unlivable environment once used to be the riverside where one would wander after school, with golden leaves swaying under a blue sky; the place where one grew up and was loved—how can you hold back your tears? I stopped reading news from the BBC or Deutsche Welle. How can you read headlines such as ‘China’s Yue Yuen Shoe Factory Workers in Major Strike’ or, ‘China in “record seizure” of illegal guns and knives’ and do nothing? But what can I do? I have been asked this question many times since I moved to Germany. I can’t be a politician, but I wish that my work could help my culture.

One hundred years ago, the Chinese reformist Liang Qichao 梁启超 (1873-1929) travelled to Europe and told Chinese students there,

What you are studying today is so that future generations of Chinese will not need to study such things. However, from the depth of my heart, I hope that when the next generation grows up, we will have inherited a mature academic tradition, and therefore have no need to travel so many miles, to learn things piecemeal with so much hard effort.

But now, like me, the young and middle-aged that are able, are emigrating en masse from Mainland China. I hope one day this will change, not in the sense that Chinese must return to their homeland, but that they will return to their culture, and not let it die like other ancient civilizations. I know that what I am doing is only like a tiny star in an immense dark sky. But it still sheds a bit of light. Jia Notes translation from Liang Qichao’s 留学之害 liu xue zhi hai (The Disadvantages of Foreign Study) (1900) quoted by ZHANG Yongle 章永乐 ]. 昔者梁任公游历欧美，正告留学生云：今日之留学，为的是未来不需留学。 吾心深然之。但愿下辈人成长之时，已有成熟的学术传统可供继承，而不需负笈万里，受这零碎之苦。

PG: Your recent works are characterized by techniques and a minimal aesthetic reminiscent of those associated with conceptual art of the late 1960s and 1970s; for example, the work Bicycle Tracks, which maps your bicycle, rides around Berlin. How did you arrive at those techniques and that minimal aesthetic and how do they support your critical intentions as an artist?

J: Three years ago, one summer night, I was with friends in their garden. A boy looked up at the stars and asked his father about astronomy. I was very sad when I saw it. I knew I had lost all the knowledge of astronomy I once had, and I have no father to ask anymore. Then it occurred to me that I had been avoiding all the subjects we were taught in China to think of as ‘boys’ subjects’, because I knew I would lose support from my father. From that moment, I decided to overcome the invisible gap between genders and any fear that comes from my childhood. With the progress of The Chinese Version series, I started to become interested in mathematics. From there, I learned computer code, and became more interested in sciences, such as biology, high tech, and new materials, etc. The science world leads you into another passion and aesthetic compared with the world of the humanities. Bertrand Russell mentioned that his maternal grandmother after the age of eighty found she had difficulty getting to sleep, so she habitually spent the hours from midnight to 3 a.m. reading popular science. Science and technology smoothly cover over my emotional traumas.

So using technology in works such as Bicycle Tracks (2014) comes naturally. In fact, in my view, this tendency is a continuation of interests underlying my first installation work which I made for the Shanghai Biennale in 2002, City Boxes. I made two 1 metre x 1 metre wooden boxes: one represents Beijing; the other, Shanghai. From outside, they are just raw boxes with a peephole. But inside the box for Beijing, I put 17 models of my favourite old buildings, which had been demolished or were scheduled for demolition. Inside the Shanghai box, I began with a famous night photo of the Bund that had been shot in exaggerated perspective with those buildings at the southern end nearest to the camera lens. I then cut the photo and rearranged the buildings in reverse order contrary to their perspectival dimensions, and affixed them to layers of glass, in order to evoke the chaotic and distorted visions the city’s development imposes. I hid all this inside a box that outwardly conveys the impression of a pure, uniform surface.

The Road Series (2009), photos are the flat pictures I took through the windshield of a speeding car on nights of mist and rain. These works also reveal a disjunction between their outward form and the real referents of the images. Any overt beauty they might have belies their relation to the disease of Western consumerism that seems to have engulfed China. The Chinese Version is also deceptive in this way. Behind the outward form that recalls Western Conceptual Art of the 1960s, is the tragedy of the missing and the simplified Chinese characters, the loss of five thousand years of my country’s and my culture’s history. In my view, a goal of conceptual art was to strip the formal aspect of a work in favour of the idea. My work reinvests a formal aspect that was stripped from Chinese characters by law.

In Bicycle Tracks, without an underlying city map, the tracks lose any diagrammatic function. I use my bicycle to make a drawing of something of which I have no clear image in my mind; since my viewpoint, while riding the bicycle, places me in the drawing as I am drawing it. For me, it’s a new way of drawing combined with new technique. On the one hand, devoid of its function as a map, the drawing seems to refer only to itself, but in fact, it conceals lots of information: where I went, whom I met, the experience of the city at the speed of a bicycle, even the sort of instinctive urban analysis that comes from my architecture education, my childhood in a Beijing once filled with bicycles — all are concealed in those lines.

As I mentioned before, I have been very interested in mathematics since my work on The Chinese Version. I discovered that there is even a class about bicycle mathematics at Cornell University. I found out about the theory of the relationship between front and rear wheels: the rear wheel always tries to follow the front wheel, but they hardly ever track the same line—even though there is a fixed mathematical relation that defines the limits of their potential variations or ‘discords’. Somehow, it’s like the relationship between partners. But even if it’s been proven, we can still hardly say that theory equals reality. In fact, the representations of the tracks from the GPS recorder app. is, in a sense, imaginary, since, at each moment, the line is simply the result of a mathematical average between two GPS points each of which has a known margin for error of up to six metres. We cannot say the tracks were really there; we can only say they were almost there. The tension between the reality and imaginary compounds itself in many directions from those abstract lines.

I also think the abstract strategy of much of my work partially comes from traditional Chinese literature, especially poems and lyrics, wherein the aim was to express as much as possible with the greatest economy of language. Abstract traditional Chinese ink painting influenced me too, and the way of thinking about lines and spaces from my architectural training are always present for me. Besides that, the repression of individualism by the Chinese Communist Party that brainwashed my grandparents, and, successively, the generation of my parents, still impacts strongly on me; the tension between the surface and what is beneath, struggling to emerge.

PG: You have stated that you seek to make beautiful art as a means of addressing an atrocious reality. Could you expand on that statement?

J: In his Ten Lectures on Modern Chinese Fiction, Wang Der-wei, (王德威) (b.1954) considered the reason why the great twentieth-century writer Lu Xun’s (鲁迅) (1881-1936) work contains so many references to beheadings—in Lu Xun’s time, these were commonplace. Wang says that, ‘on the practical and symbolic level, the state of modern China is a decapitated country, a body severed from the head that is its national spirit. The excitement of its people resides in watching beheadings or in waiting to be beheaded’. Today, we no longer have public executions, but the condition Wang ascribes to Lu Xun’s time is perhaps even worse today, where we no longer have any values except the blind pursuit of money and consumerist fantasy at the expense of every human or spiritual value.

This is the reality that the ‘beauty’ of technological and economic development conceals. If my work seems beautiful, I hope that its outward aspect will generate a tension with its underlying themes in ways that draw the viewer to a revelation about the deceptive attraction of beauty. At the same time, I still believe in beauty as a positive value.

PG: Are you influenced by theoretical writings – Chinese and western?

J: My knowledge of traditional Chinese writings on aesthetic theory comes from two standard secondary sources: A Stroll through Aesthetics (美学散步 mei xue san bu) by ZONG Baihua 宗白华 (1897-1986) and Three Books on Aesthetics (美学三书 mei xue san shu) by LI Zehou 李泽厚 (b.1930). Although I have hardly ever consciously applied traditional theory in my work, its influence is undeniable. I believe for example that the perspective treatment in my Road Series photos is due to my exposure to “the three distances” (三远 san yuan) in traditional Chinese landscape, in which the artists would use a different projection system (or perspectival scheme) for the foreground, middle ground, and background of the painting, usually concealing the transitions between these three systems behind empty volumes of clouds or mists. There are many explanations as to how and why this convention arose, but one obvious effect of it is that unlike Western single point perspective, this technique allows us to see what is behind and beyond an object in the field of view—even if it is a mountain. Since my graduation, I have not studied art theory in a systematic way, but occasionally I pick up theoretical writings—or art historical writings that include theoretical sections— that might promise some relationship to my work; but this invariably happens after the work, or the idea and work method, already is established. I am always curious to know whether such writing has a relationship to my work, but since this reading comes afterward, one can hardly say that I am influenced by such theoretical writings. I thought of this as a Chinese way of working, but I think this is the tradition in the West, too. Aristotle wrote his Poetics in response to drama that already existed; it was not prior to Greek tragedy. To say that I am not much influenced by theoretical writings obviously is not the same as saying I do not have a theory. I always have a theory, but I like to imagine that it is my own. Sometimes, I am repelled by the conclusions of theoretical writings. Relational Aesthetics, for example, I think is a horrible idea because it suggests that the work of art is ultimately is not produced by the artist at all, but by the participating spectator. I am relieved to see that the most gifted artist of that school, Pierre Huyghe, has abandoned this theory in his current work. It is the condition of my generation that we no longer even feel the need to mention our rejection of the theory of Socialist Realism in China. It is more likely that we would feel the need to reject Speculative Realism, since the latter would have us divorce the world from our conceptualization of it, despite that to make a relation between the world and our conceptualization of it is one of the great freedoms that art allows us. My basic understanding of this subject comes from Steven Shaviro’s article, “Speculative Realism—A Primer” in Texte zur Kunst, March 2014 (“Speculation”) pp.40-51]

PG: Why do you keep studios in Hangzhou and Berlin? How do you support your international practice as an artist – simply through sales of your art, or by more varied means?

J: In the end I did not keep my studio in Hangzhou. I had it for a while with the help of a friend, then I moved to my studio to Berlin. When we talk about making a living, of course in being an artist one takes a big risk. Lots of artists can’t make a living by sales of art. So far, I’ve been lucky in being able to support myself through my work as an artist. But every activity has its hard times. I had difficult periods too, and it will happen again. But if I wanted a comfortable life, I would have become a doctor like other members of my family. The proper life is not that; it’s to follow what you love in your heart.

PG: You would like to differentiate your work from that of other artists from China. In what ways does it differ from the work of other Chinese artists?

J: If I tell you my Chinese friends are laughing at me for practicing ballet every day, could you see the difference between the others and myself? I do have some friends who are also fond of traditional Chinese culture like Chinese opera, but they have nothing to do with contemporary art. I think that in general, most young people in the world feel ashamed to look back at their traditional culture. I don’t understand it at all. I even like folk music. No one in the contemporary art world thinks folk music is cool. I wish one day to have the money to issue a CD of my collection of Chinese folk music. During the 1950’s, the Chinese National Academy of Arts published a collection of folk music scores from the all over the country—there were over ten thousand songs in it—but most of the songs were never allowed to be sung. The books are still in the library, probably gathering dust. Most Chinese artists have an art school education, which I do not have. But I used my time studying to develop other interests. I was forced to read classical literature from the age of twelve. Then I fell in love with it. So I didn’t get any influence from Japanese pop culture like many of my generation did.

Perhaps my installation Untitled (2014) marks these kinds of differences. I began with the idea of Untitled after visiting the Venice Biennale, where I noticed that all the exhibitions tried to have cool titles to catch people attention, almost like consumer brand names. I then collected around 90,000 art exhibition titles from around the world during the past ten years, and strung them together to make them sound like a continuous narrative, or like rhapsodies; but in fact they are just nonsense. And the titles are almost all about the artists themselves. Being an artist does not mean just focusing on oneself, or to be the decoration of a new technology. I would like to keep studying. It’s an adventure for me.

Paul Gladston is associate professor of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham and principal editor of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.