Reflections On Court Life
By Ian Findlay
For almost a decade, Chinese painter Jia Juanli, 45, has lived and worked in France. Although far from her origins, the central subject of her paintings continues to be an exploration of China’s past, particularly that of the women of the Imperial Court.
The art of contemporary Chinese women artists is now an integral part of the powerful collective voice of the Mainland Chinese art world and its Diaspora spread throughout every continent. The art that they have made since China opened its door wide to the world in the late 1970s, to embark on unprecedented culture, economic, social, and political changes, has been quite extraordinary in its range of styles and its intellectual and artistic depth. Their impact on the international views of contemporary Chinese art has been greatly helped by the inclusion of the work by more women sculptors, painters, and installation and performance artists in a wide variety of regional and international exhibitions. At the same time, opportunities to study and work beyond China have also moved apace with the county’s development and so increased the profile of China’s female artists. This been particularly significant since the Chinese art world has for long been a community dominated by the voices and the work of male artists.
Chinese women artists such as Jiang Jie, Peng Wei, Chen Yanyin, Niu An, Shi Hui, Liu Hongyuan and Jia Juanli, to name but seven, are certainly not household names in the art world, but they each represent important individual contributions to the growing importance of the place of women artists not just in China, but also around the world. The strength of their art lies not merely in the subjects they have chosen to cover or the messages contained within their art, but also in its uncompromising individuality.
While many Chinese female artists have used their art to examine their own personal struggles and demons within the context of the great social and cultural changes that have taken place in Chinese society during the past two decades, Jia Juanli has chosen to reflect on the past. She looks back to a period of history of seemingly quiet grace and isolation, that of the traditional world of court life, its ladies, gardens, and sumptuous interiors of the Imperial Palace of the Qing dynasty. Yet, however much Jia’s world is of the past, there is always a suggestion that she is also commenting on the condition of women today. There is frequently a subtle hint within Jia’s often languid narratives that many women today – within certain segments of the new society – are just as isolated as their distant cousins were, even as the modern Chinese woman achieves greater independence and social mobility.
Jia Juanli was born in Hangzhou, China, in 1960, and graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts (1986) and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (1991). In 1996, she was awarded a full two-year scholarship from the French government to study at the Ecole d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence. Throughout the 1990s, Jia quickly gained an international reputation for the subtlety and strength of her impressionistic oils of Qing dynasty court life. Two of her major exhibitions of the past five years – A Lady’s Soliloquy (2004) and Tales from the Forbidden City (2005), both of which were shown at Hong Kong’s Connoisseur Art Gallery – were particularly impressive collections of portraits, interiors, gardens, and group scenes. The stillness of the figures and the subdued interiors and exteriors combine to draw the viewer slowly into a clearly private, muted, intimate world. The formality of the structure of Jia’s works, along with her dominant moody brownish palette, highlighted with subtle pastoral colors, suggests a somber life within the confines of the Imperial Palace.
“I have always sympathized with the lives of the women in the Imperial Court. I want to express their feelings in my works,” wrote Jia in the catalogue for her exhibition A Lady’s Soliloquy. And later in her catalogue for Tales from the Forbidden City she noted, “I used to wander through the Palace by myself in different seasons. I was truly captivated by the scene and the art; they made me want to transfer them into paintings.”
Jia’s singular examination of her subjects in a bold impressionistic manner articulates a deep personal attachment and attraction to the world of Qing court life. Jia’s astute observations of time and place lend her art a certain lyrical quality, even an ethereal one. It is no accident that the people and places that emerge under Jia’s brush to make up such series as Portraits of Qing Ladies, Palace Interiors, and Garden Scenes are so compelling. There is always a sense of knowing, of a personal experience filtered keenly through the mind. The inspiration for her art, as she has noted, stems from her experience of once having lived close to Beijing’s Forbidden City. She has absorbed the mysterious ambience of the place. This lends her art unique insight and strength and has clearly fueled the dreamy world of her imagination. She notes, “I try to capture the nostalgia for something forever gone, a sentiment you could describe as melancholic, an elegant era that is achingly beautiful, but now lost.”
The women who gaze out at the world from the confines of Jia’s canvases do indeed have an aura of melancholy about them as if they are imprisoned within a gilded world, one from which they are unable to escape. They are always somber, unsmiling, somewhat sad perhaps with the realization of their unalterable fate. Looking out at the world finely made up, clad in high-collared dresses and sometimes wearing intricately detailed head-pieces, they appear to be posing for a formal occasion, one that dictates that they may not smile, or are not encouraged to do so. The viewer may well believe that even the slightest hint of emotion has been prohibited in their tightly regulated world.
Works such as Lotus Princess, Zhi Zhi, and Portrait of a Young Lady, and Princes with Jade Earrings amply demonstrate both Jia Juanli’s technique and the mood which she wishes to highlight in her art. The stillness of these faces is no mere contrivance for they represent people of a time and place whose lives were utterly regulated in the ways they behaved and presented themselves to the world and even to those close to them. One of the exceptions to Jia’s formal portraits is Santa Lucia, in which a young lady seen in profile, with her head slightly bent, clothed in a patterned dress, with flowers in her hair and a small bird perched on the back of her hand. Here Jia evokes a dreamy, romantic, even sentimental scene, but one that hints at the solitariness of many of the women who inhabited the Imperial Court. Whether they are gazing at flowers or lotuses or calming birds, Jia injects each scene with a powerful feeling of loneliness. Often, regardless of their positions with the Imperial Court – princess or concubine – Jia makes us aware that privilege is no protection against the pains of isolation.
While Jia’s work may well represent “a harmonious fusion of Chinese cultural iconography and Western oil painting techniques,” there is an uncanny exuberance and beauty about her subjects that transcends time and place, skills and techniques. She breathes life into the figures of her narrative work with in an intense subtlety that can only be achieved by an artist who is both a keen observer of her subjects and wholly imaginative in the way she presents the surrounding details in which her characters exist. As Jia has noted, “One has to go deeper than appearances, and use one’s soul to render the visible fragment of eternity contained within a moment in time, within a life captured on canvas.”
Jia’s portraits of noble Qing ladies are compelling to the eye with their sad, pensive faces, and richly embroidered costumes. But it is in her quiet interiors and exteriors that she completely reflects the high elegance of the Imperial Palace, the secretive and closed reality of the Forbidden City. With these scenes – small, imperious tales in their own right – Jia astutely reveals temperamental lives and the intrigue of the private dramas of daily routine, from walking in the garden to having one’s hair arranged by a maid, from merely reclining on a formal chaise lounge to playing Chinese chess. Jia’s subtle touches of color and gentle fluid line combined with the settings in each scene imbues the court ladies with a sense of mystery. Although viewers catch only a glimpse of these women’s lives, there is always the discomfiting feeling that we are voyeurs of an intensely intimate world. In bringing such things to life, it is clear that Jia has found inspiration in the delicate artifacts and architecture of an imperial age. As Jia Juanli has noted, she wishes to “capture the nostalgia for something forever gone, a sentiment you could describe as melancholic, an elegant era that is achingly beautiful but is now lost.”
While we may see Jia’s solemn beauties in the faces of the modern, independent women who inhabit Beijing today, the classical interiors and gardens of the Imperial Palace are now rare. Jia’s gardens are revealed to us impressionistically as quiet, still places where the Court’s ladies retire to play, to bathe, to contemplate nature in silence, to breathe in the world without the intrusion of chatter, to calm themselves and to embrace their friendships. The gardens described in such works as Garden of Fairies, Blossoms in White, Bird of Paradise, and Dusk in the Garden are filled with the symbols of the contemplative life – birds, flowers, stillness. There is something unavoidably transcendental, ethereal in these garden scenes, as if the protagonists are about to float away on the invisible air around them. Again we are voyeurs of intimate moments that possess a fairytale essence. But instead, in such scenes, Jia’s weightless, elegant females become intertwined within a paradise of fragrant flowers and singing birds where all dissolves into an extended impressionistic lyric.
Within Jia’s interiors such as Palace Stroll, Morning Ritual, and Summer Dreaming the palette is as muted as it is in her garden series. While there is something utterly feminine in the private moments Jia explores inside the Court, there is, at the same time, the feeling that the women, even in their finery and luxurious surroundings, are like birds in their cages, unable to fly away, to clasp freedom. Perhaps if they obtained their freedom, they would die in a panic longing for the velvet prison from which they have just escaped.
The translucence of Jia’s colors – from soft sepia brown to pink, from touches of pastoral red to the gentlest blue, from faint yellow to black – are central to the success of the subtle light of each scene and to bring alive her vision of an imagined past. The line that highlights the details of birds, flowers, and screens as backdrops, as well as outlines her magical figures embraces each narrative with life. Jia clearly wants her colors “to express nature’s sweet aroma, “ and she desires that her world is “Immersed in sunlight filtered by morning fog and the sweet aroma of blooming flowers…I want the paintings to breathe; I want them to have a soul.”