The screens of Jia Juan Li（贾鹃丽的屏，帘，幔）
Pierre Paliard（皮埃尔•巴利亚）
Translated by Danielle Mc Nally （英文翻译：Danielle Mc Nally）
Jia Juan Li’s paintings usher us into illusory scenes. China appears, as in a dream, in its traditional settings, its elegant and hushed interiors, its water lily ponds and its gardens. No image of the present world comes to trouble us with its turmoil. There, we may savour an ancient charm and surrender to its nostalgia. One may see the scenes as an evocation of a time when the Middle Empire was still untouched by the violence of changes brought on by the opening to Western ideas, with their blind ideologies and technological excesses. Clearly, that notion is partly true. Jia Juan Li, however, was born in 1960, and she, like her generation, experienced the advent of a profit society, indifferent to the memory and values of the old world. That sudden transition aroused in young artists a curiosity for Western modern and contemporary art. Some artists reflected upon the heritage of Chinese art in the face of new challenges, just as had happened in the early twenties. Should one form be forsaken in favour of the other ? Could there be a fair balance between age-old Chinese art and Western art ? And if so, which Western art should be adopted, that of Cézanne and Monet, or that of Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons ?
In 1987, Huang YongPing, born in 1954, entitled one of his works « A History of Chinese Painting » and « A Concise History of Modern Western Art » Put Together for Two Minutes in a Washing Machine. Two books, widely-read by artists at the time, were thus assembled in a very concrete manner : a radical synthesis of two histories ! With this derisive action, the artist meant to stress the need to go beyond dualism, beyond the perception of two cultures meeting confrontationally for over a century. How can one meet the challenge of the time other than with self-protecting irony or with sensitive intuition ? Huang Yong Ping used irony while Jia Juan Li has opted for intuition.
In China as well as in France, where she has been living since 1996, Jia Juan Li also discovered contemporary art, but in her questioning, she has chosen to delve into a way of painting that is heedless of fashion and of the urgency imposed on creators by contemporary art. A deliberate approach and a meditative resumption of her themes infuse the silent power of her art.
Jia Juan Li’s works proceed from classical training and, admittedly, as oil paintings, they can only evoke Western masters. We are always inclined to assess the originality of a personal approach on the basis of its deviation from an alleged identity or its discernible influences. But in the convergence under consideration, who can identify with precision which are breaches and which are borrowed elements ? Did not the great Western masters that come to one’s mind when looking at Jia Juan Li’s works also find inspiration in other civilisations ?
A closer look at two of the greatest masters will bring to light the depth of such influences. Monet was imbued with a knowledege of Japanese prints. His Nympheas challenge the traditional Western representation of space by switching attention to the water’s surface and mixing in the troubling reflections of the sky. Certainly, it is not mere coincidence that a few resplendent paintings of the Nympheas series can be found in the Chichu Art Museum built by Tadao Ando in 2004 on Naoshima island, Japan, as a genuine sanctuary for modern art. As for Matisse’s dreamy odalisques, painted on backgrounds of decorative fabrics and wall coverings, they speak of his fascination for Islamic art.
Who knows what a spectator precisely sees when contemplating a painting ? What were its sources of inspiration ? The dialogue with the East has been constant, so when a young Chinese painter discovers the great modern masters, doesn’t she face at once their novelty and a reflection of her collective memory ? Rather than dwelling on a search for indeterminate influences we would like to offer a few suggestions inspired by the works of the artist herself.
Jia Juan Li’s works are first and foremost drawings. She can readily take on large-size paintings because her sure-handed drawing allows her to slowly elaborate those formats. Nothing is left to the gestures in which the tradition of ink painting often indulges. Each motif is carefully set down, each line is deliberately drawn, without impulse. In a word, each detail is well thought out, and this slow movement and total mastery exemplify the heritage of a western disegno, an Italian word that signified both drawing and intention ; what mattered was the internal vision, the plan, inspired by a deified Nature, or perhaps by God himself. Roger de Piles, a XVIIth century French painter, defined a drawing as the idea behind a painting, put down on paper or on canvas in order to appraise the contemplated work. There, more than in the use of classical perspective, lies the source of the great Western art with which Jia Juan Li converses. Her appetite for drawing is also reflected in her paintings in the absence of large masses of colour, used to simplify the shapes of a tree, a cloud or an architectural element. She is not interested in the affectations of baroque or romantic representation. Each motif is drawn and each surface is shaped by a meticulously drawn texture. This may be the secret behind the power of her art ; her paintings first appear as rough and matte surfaces and draw our attention with their earthy, bronze and gold tones, dispersing our gaze with a subtle organisation of space. Such sensitive qualities require drawing as a support.
Contrasts are few in her works, whether in colours, light or shadows. Intensity is slowly perceived as the spectator begins to comprehend. There are no heavy shadows, no dark areas, only a gentle, even light and, gazing slowly in all directions, one experiences depth in a variety of ways. Colours and light provide some of the dull flavour that the literati valued in wash drawings, while the opening of space in many directions and the absence of a center point transport us into a new mode of Western perspective.
Following the airy silhouettes of young ladies, we leisurely progress on garden paths that at times seem to vanish into the sky. In palace interiors, the same young ladies draw our attention, appearing-disappearing behind doors or screens. Elusive, they glide through the scene, and we follow their profiles or their backs as they proceed. What could one do in the Forbidden City’s succession of chambers and courtyards but pass on from one threshold to the next ? Space there was elusive too. In the Southern Song dynasty, poet Wu Wenying liked to call himself He Who Dreams of Windows (Mengchuang). His poems abound with words such as screen, paravent, shade, drape and other veils. « All means of withdrawing from reality while dreaming of a vast imaginary space » as Florence Hu-Sterck observed (Hu Sterck, 137).
There is surely a yearning for secrecy in Jia Juan Li’s world, but the interplay of screens in her paintings is not a mere quest for introversion. The multiple screens, those marvellous screens and delicate trelised panels that guide the process of our gaze and filter the light in her painted interiors, convey something more essential about the very idea of China. Nothing is provided at once, one may proceed without reference points. Philosopher Marie-José Mondzain met with Chinese painters and artists and wrote « Welcoming requires withdrawing », an invitation that fits with Jia Juan Li’s picturesque realm. This fascinating withdrawal behind so many screens and veils as well as the young maidens’ refusal to show their faces (except in the specific case of portraits) bespeak of « the unfathomable character of the visible world. » (Mondzain, 26). Painting and the world are in unison.
Gardens are the ideal locus for such connivance, but Chinese gardens are not the gardens dreamed of in the West. The people of the Bible have conceived of gardens as the paradise lost after the fall, and in the West, a bitter taste of exile necessarily taints the dream of a garden. In the East, there is no such severance of nature from the world of men : gardens harbour nature as a familiar place that men wholly inhabit. In this notion of the world’s immanence, different time frames can coexist and one’s destiny may extend beyond the limits of its narration. In this sense, Jia Juan Li’s world is a dream in the present time. Why should it be divorced from a boundless reality ? Isn’t it the case that all worldly things connect with a fantasy world ? Isn’t the world an illusion of the world ?
1) Hu-Sterk, Florence. La beauté autrement, introduction à l’esthétique chinoise. Paris : Editions You-Feng, 2004
(2) Mondzain, Marie-José. Transparence, opacité, 14 artistes contemporains chinois. Paris : Editions Cercle d’Art, 1999.
Pierre Paliard. PhD Art History. Professor at Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence