Transformation Between the Past and the Future

According to Professor Wu Hong from University of Chicago, a permanent member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “ Wu Jian'an's imagination has always operated simultaneously in multiple dimensions. Likewise, his works also simultaneously expand the viewer’s artistic imagination in various directions. He freely traverses temporal divides, instantaneously taking viewers from today’s world back to mysterious primeval times. His art spans various media and styles: painting, sculpture, paper cut and installation, all of which provide him with a varied vocabulary yet also arouse his desire to cross boundaries – to integrate, transgress and disarrange.”

This exhibit focuses on the traditional shadow art elements in Wu Jian'an's contemporary art creation, providing an angle to understanding the artist's works and establishing a connection between cultural traditions and contemporary thinking.

The Heaven of Nine Levels is a large-scale artwork completed by artist Wu Jian'an and Shaanxi shadow art master Wang Tianwen. Wu Jian'an created and painted the work, and Wang Tianwen and his team brought it to life. They have overcome many challenges in the production process, including the difficulties of collaging the leather caused by the expansion and contraction, as well as the challenge of carving such a large artwork and so on.

This is indeed inspiring, the transformation of ancient techniques and art forms has become a regrettable aesthetic image, and it has also stimulated the recovery and improvement of traditional techniques.

Seven Layered Shell consists of seven large scale works, similar in format to Chinese Zhongtang paintings, large traditional paintings typically hung as the centerpiece of a room.

Wu Jian’an created 186 separate components for the Seven Layered Shell, in which contains monsters and prodigies of the Classics of Mountains and Seas, an enigmatic work of geography from early China.

Each component is subjected to complex processes including line drawing, carving, hand-coloring, waxing, collage and stitching. Wu Jian'an uses shadow art, paper-cut and other hollow modeling methods to combine the ancient art style with the anatomy-based Western contemporary art form.

The Seven Layered Shell is a metaphor for a certain social value: an individual can only form a perfect whole when finding an absolutely correct fixed position. In the Butterfly series and Ten Thousand Things, Wu Jian'an tries to break the stereotype of this individual-collective relationship: in the chaotic and crowded relationship, the individual becomes a paradoxical whole, and the vivid whole does not seem to be pre-set, but was grown from free individuals.

Xingtian is a very important character in Wu Jian'an's works. In the Classics of Mountains and Seas, Xingtian fights against the Supreme Divinity even after he was beheaded. In the view of the artist, Xingtian represents the courage in the cultural genes, which is particularly precious in the present days.

The Shadows of the Blade series is a new level of Wu Jian’an’s artistic experiment with leather. In this series of work, the artist used different kinds of sharp tools to stab, slice and puncture the soaked buffalo hide to represent the subconscious desire for violence and destruction.

In this series of works, the artist tries to make the creations and experiments of visual art meaningful in the psychological and sociological domain.

When designing the cowhide incision on paper for the Masks, Wu Jian'an found that the cowhide looked more and more like the masks of ancient Maya and Mycenaean civilizations, or the face totems that have been refined and patterned in the Stone Age. The artist didn't think to follow the ancient patterns in his creation, these images are more like an encounter or a destiny, without being designed, tracked or sought.

The artist thinks that perhaps we have always evolved with the ancient civilizations, rather than being apart from them like we used to think. In his book Ethics, Spinoza wrote that "The human Mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the Body, but something of it remains which is eternal." Through "the eyes of the mind", one could see the past.

Art could be “the eyes of the mind", through which we could always see and meet with ourselves from other dimensions.