Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, we have spent too much time looking at cold and calculated works, conceptual installations where the idea takes precedence over sensation, intellectual gesticulations that leave us as satisfied as an empty plate. While you marvel at the latest trendy artist from Shanghai, a man in his Chongqing studio creates paintings that bleed authenticity. Wei Jia, remember this name, is perhaps the most visceral painter of his generation.
This native of Chengdu, trained in the rigorous techniques of engraving at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, has traversed the roles of model student and respected teacher to finally become a creator whose works tear the veil of appearances with stunning acuity. Do not expect a gentle stylistic evolution. Wei Jia’s art is a series of violent molts, inner metamorphoses that manifest in every brushstroke. It is the beauty of flaying.
What strikes immediately in his work is this way of capturing the human being in a state of existential fragility. His characters, often solitary male figures or in groups, float in undefined spaces, between earth and sky, between the familiar and the strange. The contours fade, the bodies blend into the landscape. One immediately thinks of Francis Bacon and his way of deforming the human figure, but without the macabre side. Wei Jia tortures his painting, not his subjects. There is a tenderness in him that transfigures suffering into something luminous.
In his recent series of works like “Untitled” (2019-2021), Wei presents blurred silhouettes that seem to emerge from a field of color, like ghosts seeking to take form. The technique is both raw and sophisticated, the wild brushstrokes build bodies that appear on the verge of disintegration. It is exactly what Antonin Artaud described when he spoke of the “body without organs”, this revolutionary conception of the human body no longer as an organized machine, but as a field of intensities, forces and sensations [1]. Artaud wrote: “The body is the body. It is alone and does not need organs. The body is never an organism. Organisms are the enemies of the body.” Wei Jia visually translates this radical thought, making his characters not anatomical representations, but presences, manifestations of a life force.
The bodies in Wei Jia’s paintings are not simply disorganized, they are becoming something else. In “Legendary Hero” (2020), the central character seems to dissolve into a vortex of blue and green, while maintaining a powerful presence. This dissolution is not a defeat, but a transformation, a passage to another state of being. As Artaud wrote in “To Have Done with the Judgment of God”: “When you have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatisms and restored him to his true freedom” [2]. Wei’s painting is precisely this act of liberation.
If Artaud provides a key to understanding the conception of the body in Wei’s work, the literature of the German writer W.G. Sebald enlightens us on his relationship to time and memory. Sebald, in his novels like “Austerlitz” or “The Rings of Saturn”, explores how the past imprints on the present, how memories persist like specters, manifesting in unexpected places [3]. He writes: “Memory, he said, often seems to me like a city where a great battle has taken place. You cannot circulate there without encountering evidence of the devastation.” Wei Jia’s figures seem to inhabit precisely such a space, a place where time is not linear but simultaneous, where several layers of existence overlap.
Take his early engravings, such as “Silence” (1999) or “Deep Breath” (2002), where young men contemplate empty spaces, distant horizons. These works are not just portraits, but meditations on temporality. As Sebald writes in “Vertigo”: “It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now in thinking back, that all the moments of our life occupy the same space” [4]. This feeling of temporal flattening permeates Wei’s work.
When Wei Jia moved from engraving to acrylic painting around 2004, he did not simply change medium, he radically transformed his relationship to representation. The carefully constructed surfaces of his engravings gave way to a more intuitive, almost violent approach. Layers of paint accumulate like geological strata, each bearing the traces of past passages. It is exactly what Sebald calls the “sediments of time”, layers of personal and collective history that accumulate, forming a dense and rich visual testimony [5].
In more recent works like “The Tumultuous River Upstream” (2020), Wei almost entirely abandons traditional figuration to reach a state where the painting itself becomes the subject. Colors clash violently, creating vibrant fields of intensity that seem to have a life of their own. The body is no longer represented but evoked, suggested by traces, gestures, absences. As Sebald wrote: “We have no idea what our bodies store in memory” [6]. Wei Jia’s paintings seem to be precisely attempts to give form to this unconscious bodily memory, to these memories that inhabit our flesh without our full awareness.
Wei’s evolution from controlled narrative images to more abstract and gestural works reflects the intellectual journey of many contemporary Chinese artists born in the 1970s. This generation grew up during a period of radical social and economic transformation. They have witnessed China’s opening to the world, the emergence of an urban middle class, the rise of a once isolated country to power. But unlike some of his contemporaries who have adopted a pop or cynical style, Wei Jia has chosen a more introspective, more sincere path.
What is interesting about Wei Jia is his ability to establish a precarious balance between control and abandon. Even in his most expressive works, there is an underlying discipline, a framework that gives shape to chaos. It is as if the rigorous training of an engraver he received continues to inform his hand, even when he engages in the wildest gestures. This tension between structure and freedom creates a particular energy that runs through all his work. We find this same tension in Sebald’s writings, where the most controlled and meticulous prose nonetheless manages to convey a sense of vertigo and disorientation [7].
Wei Jia himself declared: “When I paint, I often seek a state where I do not completely control the process. I want there to be a dialogue between me and the painting, where sometimes it is the painting that guides me.” This dialogical approach precisely reflects what Sebald describes as “a conversation with the dead” — not in the literal sense, but as an engagement with the traces of the past that persist in the present [8].
What distinguishes Wei Jia from so many contemporary artists is his refusal of easy cynicism. In an era where irony has become the default position of art, Wei dares to be sincere. His paintings do not seek to be cool or detached — they engage in a fierce struggle with the most fundamental questions of human existence. As Sebald wrote: “Perhaps we are all trying to find a place where suffering cannot reach us” [9]. Wei Jia’s paintings are not refuges from suffering, but attempts to give it meaning, to transmute it into beauty.
In “Club” (2021), Wei presents a group scene bathed in blue and green tones, evoking a nocturnal, almost dreamlike atmosphere. The figures seem suspended in a moment of communion or collective celebration. This work recalls what Sebald writes in “Austerlitz”: “We perceive time only by the external signs of its passage, those little things that show us that something has changed, that something is irretrievably lost” [10]. Wei’s characters occupy precisely this temporal interstice, a fleeting moment between what has been and what will be, a dilated present that contains both the past and the future.
Wei Jia belongs to that line of artists for whom painting is not merely a means of expression but a form of knowledge, a way of probing the depths of human experience. In this sense, he joins the ranks of great masters like Rembrandt or Goya, who used painting as a tool of existential investigation. What is remarkable is that he achieves this depth without resorting to the usual tropes of “serious” painting: no grandiose compositions, no obvious historical references, no heavy symbolism.
Instead, Wei Jia operates by subtraction, by purification. His recent paintings sometimes resemble half-erased dreams, fleeting visions that vanish as soon as you try to fix them. This ephemeral quality joins what Artaud described as the “theater of cruelty”, not a spectacle of gratuitous violence, but a form of art that “awakens the nerves and the heart”, that strikes the senses directly without passing through the filter of the intellect [11].
The colors in Wei’s recent paintings are particularly striking: deep blues, lush greens, incandescent pinks. These hues are not merely decorative, they are charged with emotion, almost synesthetic. As Artaud wrote: “In every emotion there is an organic equivalent” [12]. Wei’s colors seem to directly embody emotional states, psychic vibrations made visible.
As his career advances, Wei Jia moves further and further away from the conventions of contemporary Chinese figurative painting. His recent works no longer tell explicit stories, no longer convey clear messages. They exist rather as fields of energy, zones of encounter between the artist and the world, between the past and the present, between tradition and innovation. In this sense, they recall what Sebald calls “zones of transition”, those liminal spaces where boundaries fade, where different realities coexist [13].
What I like most about Wei Jia is that he embraces change, that he constantly reinvents his practice without ever denying his fundamental artistic identity. Each new series of works constitutes a rupture with what preceded it, while maintaining a deep coherence. It is as if each painting were an attempt to push the limits of pictorial language, to reach what Artaud called a “language situated midway between gesture and thought” [14].
Wei Jia is often classified among the artists of the post-70 generation, those creators born in the 1970s who grew up during China’s economic reforms. But his work transcends generational or national categories. He does not paint “China” or “the modern condition”, but something more universal, the quest of a human being to give meaning to his own existence in a world in perpetual mutation.
Look at “Arduous Journey II” (2022), one of his most recent works. The painting presents a mountainous landscape inhabited by barely discernible figures, like fleeting apparitions. The energetic brushstrokes create a sense of perpetual motion, as if the landscape itself were in the process of transforming. This work evokes what Sebald writes in “The Rings of Saturn”: “Perhaps our destiny is to be in perpetual motion. We do not inhabit a place, but we inhabit displacement itself” [15]. Wei’s figures seem to indeed inhabit not a fixed space, but the very flux of existence.
Whether you are connoisseurs or novices in contemporary Chinese art, I strongly advise you to pay serious attention to Wei Jia. In an art world dominated by passing trends and media stunts, his work represents something rare: an authentic quest, a total commitment to art as a means of exploring the human condition. His paintings will not offer you comfortable certainties or simplistic messages, but they will invite you on a journey into the depths of lived experience.
Wei Jia reminds us why we need painting in our digital age saturated with images. Because painting, in his hands, is not just another type of image, but a material presence, a testimony to the physical and mental engagement of a human being with the world. As Artaud wrote: “I do not like detached poems or theater. I like engaged poems, engaged in suffering, in life, in necessity” [16]. Wei Jia’s paintings are precisely that, works engaged in life, in all its complexity and contradiction.
If you find yourself in front of a painting by Wei Jia, take the time to really look. Let your gaze linger on the worked surfaces, the layers of paint, the figures that emerge and disappear. Try to see not with your expectations or prejudices, but with an open sensitivity. For what Wei Jia offers us is not a spectacle to be passively consumed, but an invitation to a visual and emotional dialogue that could well transform your way of seeing the world.
- Artaud, Antonin, “To Have Done with the Judgment of God”, Complete Works, volume XIII, Gallimard, Paris, 1974.
- Artaud, Antonin, “The Theater and Its Double”, Complete Works, volume IV, Gallimard, Paris, 1964.
- Sebald, W.G., “Austerlitz”, translated from German by Patrick Charbonneau, Actes Sud, Arles, 2002.
- Sebald, W.G., “Vertigo”, translated from German by Patrick Charbonneau, Actes Sud, Arles, 2001.
- Sebald, W.G., “The Rings of Saturn”, translated from German by Bernard Kreiss, Actes Sud, Arles, 1999.
- Sebald, W.G., “The Emigrants”, translated from German by Patrick Charbonneau, Actes Sud, Arles, 1999.
- Sebald, W.G., “Séjours à la campagne”, translated from German by Patrick Charbonneau, Actes Sud, Arles, 2005.
- Sebald, W.G., “Campo Santo”, translated from German by Patrick Charbonneau, Actes Sud, Arles, 2005.
- Sebald, W.G., “Austerlitz”, translated from German by Patrick Charbonneau, Actes Sud, Arles, 2002.
- Ibid.
- Artaud, Antonin, “The Theater and Its Double”, Complete Works, volume IV, Gallimard, Paris, 1964.
- Ibid.
- Sebald, W.G., “The Rings of Saturn”, translated from German by Bernard Kreiss, Actes Sud, Arles, 1999.
- Artaud, Antonin, “The Theater and Its Double”, Complete Works, volume IV, Gallimard, Paris, 1964.
- Sebald, W.G., “The Rings of Saturn”, translated from German by Bernard Kreiss, Actes Sud, Arles, 1999.
- Artaud, Antonin, “The Tarahumaras”, Complete Works, volume IX, Gallimard, Paris, 1979.
