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Thursday 6 February

Jia Aili: Prophet of the Digital Apocalypse

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, I’m going to tell you about an artist who shakes the bourgeois certainties you have about contemporary painting. Jia Aili, born in 1979 in Dandong, that frigid northeastern Chinese city facing North Korea, is not here to lull you with illusions or to paint water lilies that would look so lovely above your Italian leather couch.

While some marvel at Monet reproductions turned into wallpaper, Jia Aili creates apocalyptic worlds of visceral beauty that hit you in the gut. Trained at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, he could have simply perpetuated the tradition of socialist realism that marked generations of Chinese artists. But no, that would be too simple, too predictable for this tormented mind that converses as much with Caspar David Friedrich as with Francis Bacon.

The first hallmark of his work is his way of treating space and emptiness as characters in their own right. His monumental canvases—and when I say monumental, I mean formats that make a Rothko look like a postcard—create mental landscapes where solitude is not an Instagram pose but an existential experience that chills you to the bone. As Nietzsche would have said, when you gaze into the abyss in Jia Aili’s works, the abyss gazes back at you. And that abyss has nothing to do with the intellectual void of those who confuse contemporary art with interior decoration.

His masked figures, recurring throughout his oeuvre, are not here to ride the post-COVID wave. No, they embody the fragmentation of identity in our hyper-connected world, where we’ve all become digital avatars wandering in a desert of meaning. It’s Baudrillard meeting Chinese magical realism, a head-on collision between tradition and hypermodernity that makes you realize how stuck your vision of contemporary Chinese art is in the clichés of the ’90s.

The second hallmark of his work is his approach to technology as a mystical and destructive force. In “Sonatine” (2019), a masterful piece nearly 10 meters long, Jia Aili creates a universe where geometric forms float like debris from a decaying future. It’s Blade Runner meets traditional Chinese landscape painting, but a thousand times deeper. The polyhedrons traversing the pictorial space are not mere stylistic exercises—they are silent witnesses to a civilization collapsing under the weight of its own technological hubris.

Every brushstroke is a negotiation between chaos and order, between the technical mastery inherited from his academic training and a gestural freedom that would make Willem de Kooning green with envy. Layers of paint accumulate like geological strata, creating surfaces that bear witness to our troubled times.

His post-apocalyptic landscapes are not mere dystopian exercises in style. No, they reflect an acute awareness of our contemporary condition. When he paints those vast desolate expanses where solitary figures wander like specters, he doesn’t indulge in easy miserabilism. He poses fundamental questions about our relationship to the environment, to technology, and to ourselves. It’s Heidegger meeting Mad Max, but with a pictorial sophistication that leaves you breathless.

Superficial critics may see it as just an aesthetic of disaster, but they’d miss the point entirely. In “The Action of Three Primary Colors” (2018), Jia Aili demonstrates a profound understanding of Western art history while transcending it. The colors aren’t there to look pretty in your living room—they are tectonic forces clashing on the canvas, creating chromatic explosions that make fireworks look like matches.

His technical mastery is undeniable, but that’s not what makes him a major artist. It’s his ability to create works that are deeply rooted in Chinese pictorial tradition while being resolutely contemporary. When he integrates elements of calligraphy or references to classical Chinese landscapes, it’s not to please museum curators but to create a tense dialogue between past and present.

The influence of Francis Bacon is evident in his way of distorting figures, but Jia Aili goes further. His characters are not merely tortured—they are witnesses to a profound transformation of the human condition in the digital age. It’s as if Foucault had taken painting lessons and decided to visually represent his theories on power and surveillance.

In his most recent works, Jia Aili explores the boundaries between abstraction and figuration with a boldness that would make Gerhard Richter tremble. The geometric forms that traverse his canvases are not mere stylistic exercises—they are visual manifestations of a fragmented reality, where the virtual and the real merge in a macabre dance.

His studio in Beijing has become a sort of laboratory where he experiments with different materials—ashes, glass, pigments—creating surfaces that defy easy categorization. It’s what Theodor Adorno called the negativity of modern art, but pushed to its extreme in the context of contemporary China.

Jia Aili’s works are not here to comfort you or decorate your walls. They are distorting mirrors of our time, visual testimonies of a civilization at a critical crossroads. As Roland Barthes might have said, these paintings are contemporary “mythologies” that deconstruct our certainties about progress, technology, and humanity.

His recent series of mountain paintings, inspired by his travels to the borders of China, is not a simple exercise in romantic style. It’s a profound meditation on the notion of limits, of borders, in a world that claims to have abolished them. When he paints these mountain ranges intersected by abstract geometric lines, he creates a visual tension that echoes the geopolitical tensions of our era.

There’s something deeply unsettling about how Jia Aili blends references to Western art history with elements of traditional Chinese cosmology. It’s as if Giorgio de Chirico decided to reinterpret Song Dynasty landscapes but with an acute awareness of 21st-century traumas.

Jia Aili’s art resists any definitive closure. We are faced with an artist redefining what it means to be a painter today. It’s not just about mastering techniques or creating seductive images. It’s about creating works that force us to confront the contradictions and anxieties of our time. And if that makes you uncomfortable, it’s probably because you’re among those who prefer art to remain tame and decorative, confined within the reassuring limits of your bourgeois comfort zone.

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