In his first solo museum exhibition, artist Yun-Fei Ji shares his long-time interest in the social, political and environmental affects occurring in China due to the construction of the world's largest dam, Three Gorges Dam. On February 2, the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University will host the exhibition Yun-Fei Ji: The Empty City, featuring work by internationally-renowned artist Yun-Fei Ji.

Painted on rice paper with mineral inks, Ji presents The Empty City as a series of eight related landscapes. Each landscape depicts autumn, as a metaphor for the season, as well as to signify the end of a life cycle. For his exhibition at the Contemporary, Ji has created new paintings that reflect his interest in the affects the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, has had and will have on the people who live in the Yangtze River region. His paintings portray an almost prophetic view of what hundreds of thousands of people in the Yangtze River region will face.

Shannon Fitzgerald, curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and the show's organizer, describes the exhibition, "Within Ji's autumnal, veiled landscapes, are scenarios that compress the past, present and future. They also present the failure of Modernist utopian ideas and perhaps warn of what China's future may hold. From a distance, Ji's traditional brush paintings seem to hearken back to the atmospheric landscapes of the Sung Dynasty painters, but viewers who approach the work closely are quickly brought through time as his mists, waterways, mountains, architecture, and people reveal toxic clouds, boiling polluted waters, dangerous craggy mountains, fallen modernist buildings and scavengers and ghosts."

Ji's dark imagery also includes stylized abstractions that may or may not refer to speech scrolls, intestines, explosions or underworld movement. Using traditional materials (inks, muted pigments, Chinese brushes and handmade mulberry paper), Ji employs age-old methods to illuminate historic and contemporary concerns in a compressed and urgent space. His recent work deals with such issues as the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, and the environmental impact of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River region, scheduled for completion in 2009.

Support for Yun-Fei Ji: The Empty City has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Regional Arts Commission St. Louis and the Arts & Education Council.

CATALOGUE

Yun-Fei Ji: The Empty City 50-75 page catalogue, includes full-color images of the works in the exhibition with an introductory essay by the Contemporary's Curator Shannon Fitzgerald. The catalog also will feature additional essays by New York-based writer and artist Tan Lin, New York-based art critic and curator Gregory Volk, and an interview by Melissa Chiu, Curator of Contemporary art at the Asia Society in New York.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Yun-Fei Ji was included in the Whitney Biennial 2002 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and has exhibited at The Pratt Manhattan Gallery and the Drawing Center in New York City and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut, in addition to others. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Sharpe Foundation and the Pollack-Krasner Foundation.

SPECIAL EVENTS

Opening Reception
February 23, 4-6 p.m.
Opening reception and gallery talk by the artist.
Upper level, University Gallery.
This event has been sponsored in part by a donation from the DePauw University Asian Studies Program's Freeman Foundation Grant.

'Art for Lunch' Gallery Talk
Thursday, March 3, 12:30 p.m.
Sherry Mou, Assistant Professor of Modern Languages (Chinese) and Asian Studies
Three Worlds in One: Traditional Chinese Landscape Painting
"Those who discuss painting in terms of realistic representation, / Have an understanding akin to a child's," says the famous Song Dynasty scholar and poet Su Shi (1037-1101). For traditional Chinese landscape painters, the mountains, rivers, trees, rocks, and waterfalls are merely a vehicle to express their feelings, ideas, and aspirations. Thus, the artists paint their landscape in their studios, and their scrolls reflect on one hand the natural world they (and we) yearn to escape into and, on the other hand, the humanistic tradition they live and abide by. In short, landscape paintings are often the conflux of the three major schools of thought: Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. Yun-fei Ji's works continue and challenge this time-honored way of artistic representation and articulation through his masterful re-appropriation of all the conventions through a modern political and cultural lens.
University Gallery, upper level

For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882