ART CITIES:Paris-Yuan Jai

Borrowing style, patterns and materials (ink and mineral pigments on silk) from classical Chinese painting Yuan Jai transfers and incorporates them in a complex and joyful cultural narrative associating the celebration of a rich cultural legacy and the fancy of a contemporary and personal expression, filled with humour and irony.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Centre Pompidou Archive

Organized at the occasion of the donation of Yuan Jai’s painting “Charge (2012) to the collection of Centre Pompidou, this first presentation of Yuan Jai’s work in France gathers eleven important pieces produced during the last two decades by this significant Taiwanese artist. Yuan Jai produces large format works in ink on silk, a medium she appreciates for the deformations of the pattern authorized by its fluidity, the reliefs of its frame and its ability to support the weight of the colors obtained from mineral pigments. (azurite, vermilion, orpiment, malachite). The dazzling color meets the attention to detail, the jubilant and organic expansion of the forms to the mastery of the outline acquired by a long practice of calligraphy. Lush landscapes, spooky bestiaries, biographical elements and contemporary motifs are interwoven with references to the history of Western and Chinese art. Claiming its autonomy and the singularity of its expression, Yuan Jai occupies a central place in contemporary Taiwanese art. She works in reverse of the dualisms that permeate Western narratives of modernity: line and color, tradition and innovation, writing and visuality. The references that run through his work are never nostalgic wanderings, but rather the anchors of a fundamental concern questioning the plastic possibilities of a complex cultural narrative.

Yuan Jai was born in 1941 in Chongqing (Sichuan). Her father, military and literate, is close to Tchang Kaï-chek and the family moved to Taiwan in 1947wanese New Wave. In 1958, she entered the Department of Art, Taiwan Provincial Normal University (today’s Department of Fine Arts at National Taiwan Normal University), where she laid a solid foundation of Chinese painting by learning many masters, such as Pu Hsin-yu and Huang Chun-pi, etc. After graduation, she went to Europe for further studying. After she obtained her master degree in Archeologie et Histoire D’art from Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, she entered Belgium’s Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique (IRPA) and learned professional preservation and conservation of cultural artifacts. Yuan returned to Taiwan in 1969 and joined the Department of Antiquities of the National Palace Museum. She was in charge of establishing the Office of Technology, the first office dedicated to the conservation of cultural relics in Taiwan, in which she contributed what she had learned abroad to the museum and also had the opportunity of viewing masterpieces of Chinese ancient and modern arts. Yuan Jai did not resume her painting until the age of later 40. Since re-picking up her painting brush again, Yuan Jai has attempted to find innovative methods of Chinese painting by using the tradition as the foundation and incorporating skills and concepts she absorbed from different resources she had encountered in the life process. She explores the diverse possibilities of subject matters and colors in Chinese painting in addition to her innovative experiments of the expression methods. Yuan Jai revives the narrative potential of Chinese painting by continuously positioning the narrative within the relationship between the individual and history. As Yuan Jai’s paintings express the individual experience as an intense and brilliant visual world, they simultaneously concentrate cultural experience into an analysis of values worthy of communal consideration.

Info: Centre Pompidou, Place Georges-Pompidou, Paris, Duration: 5/2-27/4/20, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-21:00, Thu 11:00-23:00, www.centrepompidou.fr