All about Love: Solo Exhibition Curated by Zhu Qi, Today Art Museum Beijing, China

Love and pray for the people

Zhu Qi

Because of “MY 1997”, Ai Jing has become one of the most brilliant folk singers. It seems that she is an artist who likes to express her feelings through some historical events, and we can see this is her latest series about the earthquake in Sichuan province. However, to everyone’s surprise, she has expressed herself through visual art rather than music.

Ai Jing will never be an artist such as Bob Dylan, who has a love of politics and social issues, but on the other hand, she may produce a wish for humanity in the depth of her soul to express her personal blessing via these emotions and imaginations of the real lives, which connect with each other by these historical events. Therefore, her understanding of ‘love’ has already reached the level of a religious-like devout state.

Love and Godliness. There seems to be a mysterious connection in nature between ‘love’ and the name of ‘Ai Jing’ (for ‘Ai’ in Chinese has the same pronunciation as ‘love’). The word ‘love’ is often overused nowadays as a vague idea to express youth and secular affairs in our modern cities, and it is also a concept of religion in which ‘love’ becomes an unbounded vessel. Moreover, everyone can be the vessel of love, the degree of pouring life energy into the vessel will decide how powerful one’s love will be. We should not only take from the vessel, but more important offer love to others and pray for them.

The works in this exhibition originated from the date August 8, 2008, and Ai Jing decided to record every single day beginning April 30. However, the disaster of Sichuan earthquake made exerted a great influence on the form of her creations. She has tried to find many newspaper and pictures about the disaster zone, on which she portrays the date on each. What she has done is like a practice of Zen for blessing.

The painting of Ai Jing is close to conceptual art in the sense of the language of art. She takes newspapers and pictures as ready-made materials on which some minimalist style words are sketched, such as ‘2008 XX XX’. This kind of time form will reflect a ritual feeling which makes people stop and concentrate immediately, and the deep motion and reflection of impression will be touched by the fluorescent gray words.

Minimalist fonts, regular arrangement and fluorescent colors are the basic painting forms of the ‘LOVE’ series performed by Ai Jing in recent years. However, she did not involve social themes in the beginning, and the word of ‘love’ was repeated orderly and regularly in her works. Using words originated in a basic art form of American conceptual art in the 1960’s, as the ‘different forms of one concept of Joseph Kosuth or the ‘neon lights’ of Jenny Holzer.

The words in Ai Jing’s paintings involve a feeling of ritual, but the more attractive parts are the tint of the colors. Being a famous folk singer, she never had any professional training in painting, but she shows a tremendous gift and sensitivity to colors and tints that is even better than some professional artists. Her painting acts as a practice of Buddhism; she paints one layer after another on one single character time and time again until the layers arise up from the canvas. All the colors are fluorescent, mainly black and white, but also including some earthy yellows and pink. These fluorescent colors deliver all kinds of delicate emotions, like the tones of music.

The sense of music tones must have a strong influence in her color concept of painting, just as she says that painting gives her more freedom and expression. In fact, the main feature of her painting is her focus on tints of colors; she mixes her own colors to express some delicate feeling more accurately. The tints can touch the viewers immediately. According to common sense, music has more direct expression than painting; fantastically, the paintings of Ai Jing’s have a more powerful emotional, penetrating ability than music.

Conceptual art is only an exterior form; the core of Ai Jing’s painting is connected to the soul of a human being. The religious-like prayer has been performed via a certain symbol to reveal the life of the spirit, which is the main mode of her creation. Another series of her paintings put the words with a pig together to seek the relationship between one’s soul and a common symbol.

In this respect, her painting is as close to an activity as a religious-like praying, which can obviously be found in her earthquake series. From the song “MY 1997” to the earthquake series, which records the passing time, she is trying to create a sublime soul from praying for one’s self to praying for others. On a deeper level, her art performance is always seeking a connection with significant events, and implies a feeling of belonging and of one’s love deep in the soul, which will avoid loneliness and a lack of feedback.

This ideal seems like a spirit dream of a female artist, which makes her more like the artist Yoko Ono, who combines music with visual arts, rather than Bob Dylan. In the world of folk songs, Bob Dylan is more likely inclined to social critique and political protest, whereas female artists are seeking spiritual love, which will tolerate the world and people. And they have faith in this powerful way to change the world

In East Park of Wangjing, 21^st of October, 2008