Open: Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

52 Walker St, 2nd Floor, NY 10013, New York, United States
Open: Tue-Sat 10am-6pm


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Yun-Fei Ji: The Sunflower Turned Its Back

James Cohan, 52 Walker St, New York

Thu 17 Nov 2022 to Sat 7 Jan 2023

52 Walker St, 2nd Floor, NY 10013 Yun-Fei Ji: The Sunflower Turned Its Back

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Artist: Yun-Fei Ji

James Cohan presents The Sunflower Turned Its Back, an exhibition of new work by Yun-Fei Ji. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at James Cohan.


Artworks

The Bed

Yun-Fei Ji

The Bed, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

1016 × 762 mm

© Yun-Fei Ji 2022. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica

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Sunflower Turned Its Back

Yun-Fei Ji

Sunflower Turned Its Back, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

762 × 1016 mm

© Yun-Fei Ji 2022. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica

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The Man with Glasses

Yun-Fei Ji

The Man with Glasses, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

457 × 610 mm

© Yun-Fei Ji 2022. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica

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The Red Moving Truck

Yun-Fei Ji

The Red Moving Truck, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

610 × 914 mm

© Yun-Fei Ji 2022. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica

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Everything Moved Outside

Yun-Fei Ji

Everything Moved Outside, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

762 × 762 mm

© Yun-Fei Ji 2022. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica

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Bunk Bed

Yun-Fei Ji

Bunk Bed, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

762 × 610 mm

© Yun-Fei Ji 2022. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica

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Man with Cut Down Trees

Yun-Fei Ji

Man with Cut Down Trees, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

762 × 1016 mm

© Yun-Fei Ji 2022. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica

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The Red Truck is Waiting

Yun-Fei Ji

The Red Truck is Waiting, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

762 × 610 mm

© Yun-Fei Ji 2022. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica

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Sewing / High Noon

Yun-Fei Ji

Sewing / High Noon, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

610 × 762 mm

© Yun-Fei Ji 2022. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica

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Going Home in High Spirits

Yun-Fei Ji

Going Home in High Spirits, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

762 × 762 mm

© Yun-Fei Ji 2022. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica

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The Fan with Cloth on It

Yun-Fei Ji

The Fan with Cloth on It, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

762 × 762 mm

© Yun-Fei Ji 2022. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica

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Migrant Worker's Tent

Yun-Fei Ji

Migrant Worker's Tent, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

610 × 610 mm

© Yun-Fei Ji 2022. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica

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The Woman in the Pink Shirt

Yun-Fei Ji

The Woman in the Pink Shirt, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

762 × 762 mm

© Yun-Fei Ji 2022. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica

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Satellite Dish on a Bed

Yun-Fei Ji

Satellite Dish on a Bed, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

508 × 508 mm

© Yun-Fei Ji 2022. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica

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Installation Views

For more than two decades, Yun-Fei Ji has employed the flattened space of classical Chinese painting to tell contemporary stories that, while geographically specific, speak to collective human experiences. The artist has an enduring interest in issues of migration and labor, both in the US and China. Each composition is an act of resistance, and a recognition of the resilience of those who have been uprooted in the name of progress. Ji insists that these narratives of displacement and environmental destruction are worth preserving.

For The Sunflower Turned Its Back, Ji shifts from his established medium of ink and watercolor on paper to create vibrant paintings on canvas that possess a quietly evocative intensity. In these works, Ji paints landscapes and interior spaces marked by human presence, often absent of figures themselves. These spaces are makeshift or in transition, suggesting the migration and displacement of the individuals who live in them. When people do appear in these compositions, it is obliquely–their backs to us, depicted in profile, and rarely gazing directly at the viewer. Ji builds this sense of inhabited space through the accumulation of everyday objects that together tell the stories of lives lived in motion.

These paintings draw upon a wide range of artistic influences, from the stacked perspective of Song Dynasty landscape painting to the work of Günter Grass, Guston, and Bonnard. Ji’s work has always been defined by the artist’s syncretic approach to image-making, but this new medium renders that hybridity more readily apparent. Ji creates finely rendered details–a chair, a hanger, a fan–that provide points of entry into his painted universe as it resolves and dissolves before the eye. There is a nimble shift between chaos and order within the compositions, built through a balanced hierarchy of mark-making.

For Ji, art-making has always been his way of pushing against the status quo of society and the erasure of those at its margins. The title of the exhibition is a painterly subversion of Chinese government propaganda that characterizes the party boss as the sun and the citizens of the People’s Republic of China as sunflowers turning toward their chairman. With quiet poetry, Ji makes visible the lives and labors that have created the world in which we live today.

Yun-Fei Ji (b. 1963, Beijing, China) earned his BFA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, and his MFA from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Prizes and residencies include Yale University Artist-in-Residence (2005), American Academy Prix de Rome Fellowship and Residency (2006), and the Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art Artist-in-Residence (2007). Major solo exhibitions include Ji Yun-Fei: Last Days of Village Wen at the Cleveland Museum of Art; Yun-Fei Ji: The Intimate Universe at the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, which traveled to the Honolulu Museum of Art (2016); and Yun-Fei Ji: Waterworks at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2013). Ji has been the subject of further solo exhibitions at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI; Paul and Lulu Hilliard Museum of Art, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, LA; University Museum of Contemporary Art, UMASS Amherst, MA; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Rose Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham; Peeler Art Center, DePauw University, Greencastle; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

© Yun-Fei Ji 2022. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Phoebe d'Heurle

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