Wu Jian'an | This Beijing Artist Is Too Big to Miss

Shallow Mountain, 2016

Standing in Chambers Fine Art before Wu Jian’an’s Shallow Mountain, we become the emperor of the faceless. Each clay brick before us stands erect or slumps on its side. Each bears the artist’s mark, as watery erosion or harsh geometry. The 1,500 figures, each with a chalk outline signalling their brevity, seem to await our orders. Their volume and solemnity elevate us.

Installation View

The effect of Big Skeleton provokes the opposite sensation, but for the same reasons. The installation takes rope and conch shells—each a bit of life’s protection, cast off for the next—as pixels in this massive memento mori. The size of the piece is humbling and evokes a rare sense of awe.

Fans of Wu’s work will see the common thread, in these and especially the title piece. “Modularity”—the ability to use tools and components interchangably—is the name of his game. Whether shells, bricks, or his signature hand-dyed paper figures, Wu plays in the realm of repetition, crafting cohesive patterns even as the individual variations draw our eye.

Ten Thousand Things, 2016

Ten Thousand Things, details

Ten Thousand Things employs those myriad tiny figures—monsters and saviors, drawing on Buddhist themes—to create “paintings” of overwhelming scale. Up close, the figures reveal a maddening jumble of figures repeating, layering, and hiding. Pull back a little and scenes and stories emerge, but step back further and the colored figures smear together like rainbow ink beneath a titan’s brush. Vaguely resembling ancient paintings of China’s magic mountains, the effect is massively impressive. You’ll want to linger to savor the details.

Installation View

Not all the pieces share this scale or quality. 500 Brushstrokes is decidedly experimental, and we look forward to seeing future iterations. But the intensity and novelty aren’t yet matched by a cohesion or immediacy. 36 Strokes continues the artist’s experiments in brushstrokes, here carving marble to look like smears of ink. It’s novel and the laser cutting is finely done, but there is tragedy in that beautiful, wasted stone.

36 Strokes , 2016

Chambers consistently presents some of the city’s most impressive exhibitions and this is no exception. Place yourself before these massive, intensely enthralling works and feel your perspective shift. This is too big to miss.

From: City Weekend