Murmur

Ji Dachun
Born in Nantong, Jiangsu Province, China, in 1968.
He lives and works in Beijing, China.

Ji Dachun is a painter whose explorations evolve with each year. He belongs to a generation of Chinese artists who, educated amid the remnants of the Soviet-inspired socialist realist orthodoxy during the late 1980s and early ’90s, were later left to find a new path forward outside of both the more avowedly conceptual avant-gardes of that period and the confines of the official system. Trained first in the province of Jiangsu and then in the famously experimental Fourth Painting Studio in the Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, his early works often centered on modest compositions surrounded by copious blank space, offering alternately playful and allegorical figures, such as an ostrich with its head in a sock or a pair of copulating teddy bears. These were permeated by the modest, bemused humor typical of a certain strain of Chinese intellectual culture.
In recent years, Ji Dachun has set aside the more narrative thrust of his earlier work and focused on the physical properties of mark-making, forming new compositions that contain expansive variations of texture and gesture. The paintings refer ambiguously to sources as varied as the rigid conventions of cartography or anatomical and botanical drawing on the one hand, and the arbitrary beauty of Twomblyesque scribbles and tea stains on the other. At certain points, these paintings seem interested in little beyond their own material presence. Upon close inspection, however, they reveal a deeply inventive and eclectic aesthetic sensibility that, without making direct reference to it, comes unmistakably from the particular intellectual and social alchemy of China today. As Ji Dachun has said, “On the painting surface, different understandings of form appear. If they are forced together, if I myself judge it to be right, then a surprising effect will occur—it may cause a discomfort, an abnormality visually, and create a corresponding reaction psychologically against the visual habits in viewers or painters.”