About No Way – Jiang Huajun’s Solo Exhibition
The solo exhibition titled as “No Way” of Jiang Huajun will be presented at PIFO New Art Gallery on Aug. 15, 2010 following up Haizhou Wu’s Art 2010 “the Public Unknown”.
Jiang Huajun’s paintings might be regarded as an “extraordinary” to the observation of contemporary art practice, which has no relation to the body
language form and no idea about strategic namby-pamby expressed by painting conception, but using a modern artist’s internalized feelings to show his own realization and thoughtfulness of surroundings on canvas truthfully and construct a whole individualized menu depending on his intuition and instinct. He shows the spiritual predicament,the heart of resistance, encountered in the existed survival world out visually. Although it shows his strong personal statement, let the viewers feel a kind of palpitation and disconsolation which seems straight to their heart sedulously on visual.
PIFO persists in exploring the new probability of narration and excavating elements of contemporary art paintings. From Xiong Yu’s exhibition of “Angel in City” to Wu Haizhou’s “the Public Unknown”, PIFO consciously gets in touch with the artistic intuition and the narrative sensibility of painting which are neglected by contemporary art swim. By right of his own brushwork with strong personal emotions, Jiang Huajun is determined to unveil the resistant volition emerged in his individual life.
KEEP WATCHING THROUGH DEATH
ABOUT JIANG HUAJUN’S ART WORKS
Jiang Huajun’s works is a little bit anachronistic with the popular so-called contemporary art nowadays. Because his works went without fashionable, superficial and stimulative effect formed by desired creation, without full-spread overruns of post-colonial words and even without connivance and catering for western aesthetic sentiment. His creations much more embody the perplexity and desirability of non-utilitarian survival in the cockles of his heart, which means his creation is a way in allusion to the survival pressure and defect in reality. In other words, he just chooses this way to express his feelings and experiences towards world, because he has known some issues which deserves and must be revealed, such as the unprecedented swell of substance desire, the lose of humanity spirit and the anomie of different kinds of values led by social conversion, especially his contradiction and loneliness among these as well as the non-habitual anxiety about spirit drift. However, his creations show different kinds of tribulations in this spiritual perplexed era, meanwhile, express his misery of spiritual relics as well as the quest and salvage of new survival state of human kind.
erview of Jiang Huajun
by Jiang YueHong
Q: Jiang Yuehong A: Jiang Huajun
Q:Can you describe the town where you spent your childhood?
A:The most part of my childhood I remember was spent in a small town about 30 km away from Hengyang. The place where my father worked was one of many mining areas in the town. There was a kind of hall-like cinema, a state-owned store run by the local supply and distribution society and noisy crowds on every fair day. I completed my elementary schooling in the primary school affiliated to the mining factory where my father worked. As I remember, I had to walk across certain railway sections, part of a national highway and the bazaar in the town, and then get over a hill before I reached the headquarter of the mining factory where the school was located.
Q:When did you “leave” there?
A:I didn’t really leave there until I went to the Technical Secondary School of Art in the provincial capital after my junior schooling. I remember I would always sit alone on that short bounding wall around the unit where my father worked, watching one train after another coming or going in a daze with no idea of where they were coming or going. Today I think such a doing of mine at that time might have implied certain kind of imagination or expectation about a world far away. It might be such a kind of imagination that has fostered my desire for leaving there. I haven’t been back there almost ten years long. If I back there, what I want most to do shall be to check if all those scenes still kept in my memory remain there. And probably I would go and sit on the cistern on the top of that mountain for a while as I used to in childhood.
Q:When did you “leave” there?
A:I didn’t really leave there until I went to the Technical Secondary School of Art in the provincial capital after my junior schooling. I remember I would always sit alone on that short bounding wall around the unit where my father worked, watching one train after another coming or going in a daze with no idea of where they were coming or going. Today I think such a doing of mine at that time might have implied certain kind of imagination or expectation about a world far away. It might be such a kind of imagination that has fostered my desire for leaving there. I haven’t been back there almost ten years long. If I back there, what I want most to do shall be to check if all those scenes still kept in my memory remain there. And probably I would go and sit on the cistern on the top of that mountain for a while as I used to in childhood.
Q:When did you start painting?
A:I first learnt to draw in an exclusive art class I took during the summer holiday after my first grade study in middle school.
Q:In your memory, what is the first book that you read related to painting?
A:The first book about painting shall be the textbook of traditional Chinese painting distributed by my school. The first book about art I read seriously shall be the one about the biography of Auguste Rodin. I read it in a rental room of a friend near Hengyang Normal School after my middle school. I don’t remember lots of its details in content now. However, it is this book that has consoled my persisting expectation of an artist’s life for a long time.
Q:Can you talk about your reading practice?
A:If we talk about keeping a reading practice as a habit, I think I must have kept it since 2001. Well, there is also a matter of time I should clarify. In Year 1997, I left Hunan Provincial Art School and went to Beijing. Then I girded myself for the admission of Central Academy of Fine Arts. The following four years saw me how to prepare and take its entrance exams. In Year 2001 I went to Beijing Youth University for Political Sciences (at the time our first grade study was taken in the Dong-fang University District of Langfang). I rented two wing-rooms of an old quadrangle outside the campus, of which the front one was used as my studio and the inner one for sleeping. I had been physically and mentally exhausted through my school leaving of Year 1997 to Year 2001. After that, the coming college life of one year and half seemed as a retreat to me. Since then, reading became a part of my daily life. Later on, I left the college in Year 2002 spring term. However, reading already became what I always need at the time.
Q:Do you read when you get in bed? If so, what have you read recently?
A:I’m reading mostly in bed. Because of it, I haven’t been used to turning off the reading lamps all these years. Well, I once got a sick psychology long time ago, fearing that I couldn’t wake up if I fell in sleeping. Reading with a lamp on was a kind of resistance to the fear, and it was also helpful for my insomnia. Well, since I have heard the term “light pollution” recently, I would turn off the lamp when I awake at midnight. I think such an “insignificant” reading or meditation to me is my extra greeting to that not-on-the-scene world. Recently I have re-read “Milosz’s ABC” by Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish American poet. It is a memoir-like one. It is by my bed now.
Q:When did you get known of Central Academy of Fine Arts?
A:I first heard a mention of its name during that summer holiday after my first grade study in middle school. The tutor of that exclusive art class was a repetitive returning student who had failed several times in his application for the academy’s admission. In Year 1995, I went to study in the High School Affiliated to the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou for the first time. In Year 1997, leaving Hunan Provincial Art School, I got a picture of Central Academy of Fine Arts in mind just from its physical address – “WanHongXiJie NanHuQuQiao(the West Street of Ten-thousand Colors by the Bridge over the South Lake Dyke)”- before I went there . When I was there, there were lots of vendors and peddlers outside it, with dusts flying upwards in the air. Such a view toppled over what I had imaged about it before. However, it didn’t really affect my mood in pilgrimage. That’s why I would have still loafed around the academy even till the time one painting pal of mine was quite close to his graduation there. We had once taken the exam together before…Perhaps at that time, it was much more natural for us to regard that there should be a given tie-up between studying in the academy and being an artist, regardless of that we know well lots of masters have been abandoned by the academies. Afterwards, I advanced my study in the academy for three years from 2004 to 2007.
Q:Have you sold your own pieces? What about that first deal?
A:It was at the beginning of 2007, in the Art Camp of SuoJiaCun(Suo-family Village). Two Israeli buyers bought my pieces. The interpreter introduced that they were from Tel Aviv Museum of Art. They bought two pieces. It is said they even held an exhibition in Israel afterwards. At the selling time, I felt fairly complicated in mind. I might have thought of Van Gogh’s exchanging his arts for breads. Before getting the pieces out of the frames, I remember, I had asked my friend to take a picture of me and the two sold pieces together.
Q:Do you remember your first experience of losing your way?
A:In fact, I always think I have a pretty good sense of direction. Even when I went abroad for the first time, although the lanes among those isles of Venice easily cause one losing his way, I found myself still fine with the directions, never taking a wrong way at all. However, that I once lost my way in Tianjin in Year 1998 is very impressive to me. Since then, I frequently mentioned such an experience when I attended a pre-exam class. At the time, I went from Tianjin Art Academy to a friend’s rental house. He had once led me there before and I remembered clearly that bystreet and that court yard where he lived, but when I really went there, I hardly found a way to tell it out. That afternoon I spent was as in a dream. Because there was no phone by hand, I had to return at last.
Q: What kind of “waiting” experience do you remember impresses you most?
A:It is in the year that I took the entrance exams for the admission of the Technical Secondary School of Art (also known as Hunan Film Art School) after graduation from my junior school. Having taken the preliminary and retrial in Changsha, I returned to the school to prepare myself for the cultural exam. When I checked the result by phone, I got known that I passed it, but I said I didn’t get my permit card for the cultural exam, and my teacher thus said I might have failed. I remember making a call at that time is pretty expensive, so I didn’t double check it at all. However, I was still waiting for the convocation notice of the cultural exam in mind. At last there arrived no notice. I had to take part in the general exam for the high school admission. Afterwards, the tutor of that exclusive art class told me there was a letter from the film school to me. It was the letter bearing the notice of my professional qualification and my permit card for the cultural exam issued by the school. Several years later, when I read Kafka’s “the Castle”, the story reminds me of that experience of mine. The hero “K” in the novel might find his “modern copy” in me somehow.
Q:What about when you first felt in “danger”?
A:During my second grade study in middle school, my mum was seriously sick. I went from school to the hospital, where I found her suddenly unable to recognize me. At that moment, I did feel in “danger” extremely.
Q:What about when you first felt helpless?
A:That must be the time when my family member passed away.
Q:Can you talk about your first impression and awareness of “nudity”?
A:My first impression and awareness of the term “nudity” must be a sense of shyness. Now it turns to be of body or corporeity. Of cause, as for body or corporeity itself, it bears lots of implications and attributes.
Q:Do you dream often? Do you convert what you have dreamed into a painting?
A:The question lets me recall my childhood, when there were certain propaganda pictures such as the piece marked with a slogan “Dedicating Ourselves to Motherland via Science” pasted on the walls of my home. In that piece, there is a little astronaut driving an airship in the outer space. Such a dream of the scene turned up often in my childhood. If we need explore the possible link between what one paints and what he dreams, I think there are probably certain hints in what I paint, for instant, animals. I once dreamed of myself being run after by certain animals. When I woke up in the morning, I drew a tiny outline due to the dreaming scene slightly kept in mind. Perhaps whereas the dream has some other implication, the painting just shows a fragment or clip of that dream.
20 JUL 2010
