The Couple fabricating Soft Mountains, 2005
Ji Wenyu and Zhu Weibing
计文于...............朱卫兵
Painter,
Instalations, Ji *1959 Shanghai and Zhu *1971 Heilongjiang
Husband
and Wife (2003), Live and work in Shanghai
The
Couple fabricating Soft Mountains, 2005
This artistic couple collaboratively create soft sculptures, toys made to represent China’s contemporary culture. Ji Wenyu and Zhu Weibing were born in 1959 and 1971 respectively, and both are graduates of the Shanghai Art & Crafts School. Their delicately balanced works owe much to Zhu’s training as a fashion designer and art professor, while Ji previously worked as a painter. Their social and political critique of China’s command-consumer economy is plain to see in their works, which have been exhibited all over the world.
As the two tell the tale of how they
began working together, their closeness is obvious as they finish
each other’s sentences. With their artistic enterprises and an
11-year-old lovely daughter, Ji says their collaboration never stops.
“We are at the studio together and at home together and in both
places we are always busy. When we are at home, we always discuss the
arts, and sometimes also our daughter will participate in our
discussions while she is doing her homework. We are immersed in this
lifestyle and for us, it’s completely natural.”
Photo and text
vantageshanghai
(2012)
Ji's previous Life and
Paintings
1959-2003
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“I like the way in
which Mao Zedong spoke.”
Comment
on his work by Ji Wenyu, Aug,2000
“I want my works to be
unique. Coming straight from the heart, they have abandoned all
affectation and so are necessarily natural. They come from my
individual and unique experience of life and so they must be unique.
I want my works to be interesting and possess a feeling of the times.
Everyone is limited by the times in which one lives and it is
impossible consider things disengaged from the environment in which
you exist, just like Michaelangelo, Rembrant, Wharhol, and Beuys we
too are unable to resolve some of the problems we face. "Pen and
ink follow the times!" Therefore only people who break free from
conventions are able to have interesting experiences and seize the
times and culture of the times to produce new art. It is my desire
that my works possess a certain integrality. I want to be able to
coordinate the creation from concept to production so that any
contradictions and sentiments as well as conceptual changes in the
work can achieve a kind of integrality. To achieve this requires an
understanding of art and true emotion. I want my works to be everyday
and easy to understand. I don't like to feign profundity. I like the
way in which Mao Zedong spoke. Every sentence he used was easily
understandable and yet he was a great leader. The first goal for my
works is that they be easy to understand. But naturally, I can't
force people to like them.
shanghaiartgallery.com
Jin Wenju's and Zhu
Weibing's Cooperative
2003-20012
Let Hundred Flowers Bloom
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Zhu Weibing and Ji Wenyu have been
making textile-based sculptures together since 2003. [They worked for
four years on the third above installation]. Their delicately
balanced works owe much to Zhu's training as a fashion designer and
art professor, while Ji worked previously as a painter, incorporating
Western Pop art. In their soft sculptures, the artists comment on
consumerism and social aspirations in post-Cultural Revolution China.
With People holding flowers 2007, the artists have selected a subject
that contains potent symbolism for Chinese culture, recalling
Chairman Maos dictum which preceded the bloody purges of his Hundred
Flowers Campaign of 1957. Using the flowers symbolism, the artists
contrast the de-individualizing effects of mass consumption with the
subservience of the individual to the state under communism.
GOMA-APT6
Views from Shanghai
Watching
the View, 2005
Despite Ji’s sardonic pose, there
is something touchingly sentimental about the panel 'Watching the
View', wherein a small figure stands on the balcony of his faceless
apartment tower and gazes at distant mountains with an almost
proprietary pride. The petty aspirations of Shanghai’s striving
classes are easy to mock, but Ji reveals a gentler sympathy with the
tower dweller, realizing a fantasy of affluence and autonomy beyond
the dreams of his younger self.
From artnet
The Real View
The
exhibition took place at ShanghART on Moganshan Lu lane in Shanghai
in 2005
Another view: Moganshan Lu arts
area, a collection of reconverted warehouse galleries along Suzhou
Creek in Shanghai [the low buildings across the creek]. Rotting
industrial debris and sullen apartment complexes lend the new art
district an air of gritty authenticity, but don’t be fooled --
plenty of money is being made here. On a recent Friday evening, the
complex was nearly deserted except for a few security guards, maids
and the odd curator, wilting in the sticky heat and mosquito
eddies.
artnet
