JING Shijian: The Snail's Universe and Playful Landscape
ARARIO GALLERY is pleased to announce the opening of Jing Shijian | The Snail's Universe and Playful Landscape on May 26, 2018. The exhibition will present Jing Shijian's The Snail's Universe and Playful Landscape series through his latest paintings and sculptures. In this stage of Jing’s creation, the artist has gone beyond his previous creative approach into a completely new art world of his own. Jing Shijian’s creation is always full of vitality. By utilizing surrealist techniques to depict mysterious illusions with realist implications, such as landscapes, characters, animals, mirrors, double images and so on. Blending realism, modernism, surrealism, and even magical realism, combining real objects with metaphors or symbolic meanings, eventually the different schools of art and the various creative approaches have been united in the work of Jing Shijian, forming the representative character of his art and his creative vitality.
As a continuation of Jing Shijian's creating system, he has created a unique landscape and built up a different view of space and time. In this particular landscape, time is invariable, space can be overlaid, the reality and imaginary can exist simultaneously. Furthermore, the human and nature consist a drama that full of conflicts, while the tragedy and comedy of human nature is between the bantering and bantered, heading to the deepest feeling of alienated and lonely. The main focus of the exhibited works is painting which consist of landscapes and characters. However, being different from the previous works, the landscapes and characters in Jing’s new creation appear with a kind of tense and the inner conflict. The familiar scenes of landscapes and characters has been scenarized with different kinds of narration that created different sense of feelings—sometimes solemn, sometimes dramatic, and sometimes timeliness. The supernatural visual images enter into the picture and add the absurd or inconsistent factors into the picture, which make the creation look like either metamorphosed element or the true nature of daily life. In the end, all of these combine together and construct a brand-new art world that belongs to Jing Shijian.
In this new world of art, the artist selects snails and landscapes as important symbols. In the era of rapid development, expectation is accompanied by anxiety, uneasiness, and even a kind of arrogance that floods the entire world. The artist treats snails as a fairy tale that has been ignored or described, forming its own fairy tale issue. At the same time, it is also acting as a continuation of human life. In this era, the playful landscape becomes an important place in the greater scope of the world, offering unprecedented discovery. Between the bantering and the bantered, the nature of the universe witnesses all the human’s landscape just like the snail constantly views all the vicissitudes of human being. It makes a mock of the claim that human boasts about the described landscape is becoming the cosmopolitan landscape. In the snail’s universe and the playful landscape, the micro and the macro become the most fundamental elements. The plots and stories take place in the process of bantering and bantered. For this reason, we have begun our ultimate questioning through the meditation in the snail’s universe.
