Nagel Draxler

Ji Dachun

Rain in rain, cloud in cloud, at no one’s fingertips

18 Jan - 07 Mar 2020

Ji Dachun
Rain in rain, cloud in cloud, at no one’s fingertips
Exhibition view, 2020
Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin
Photo: Simon Vogel
JI DACHUN
Rain in rain, cloud in cloud, at no one’s fingertips
18 January - 7 March 2020

Ji Dachun’s CODE

To describe Ji Dachun as a post-internet artist, at first sight seems inadequate. His painting doesn’t appear as particularly technoid or media based.

At the heart of his more recent work, however, is to create a possible syntax of his medium along the transmitted painterly forms, and so to speak “to write and continue to write” its CODE.

If a program is always aimed at its application, a language is always aimed at communication and a symbol is always aimed at something that it represents, abstract art stands for a counter-world freed from functions and meaning.

Abstract painting tries to negate the symbolic conciseness of painterly means of expression, painterly language, painterly code. It wants to be pure form / language, significant without signified. And this is precisely where it has had a historical dimension since it appeared in the modern era. Ji Dachun generates a multi-layered and open painterly language that is reminiscent of the structures and compositions of Chinese landscape painting and at the same time removes its content and context. It is powered by the juxtaposition of technical opposites – linear and painterly, organic and geometric, color and pallor, flatness and texture, positive and negative space.

Ji Dachun, born 1968 in Jiangsu, China, lives and works in Beijing and Berlin. Solo presentations of his work include exhibitions at Museum Ludwig, Koblenz; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome; Kunstmuseum, Bern; Posco Art Museum, Korea; and the Shanghai Art Museum, China. Institutional group exhibitions include: Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; mumok – Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna; Hamburger Kunsthalle; Times Art Museum, Beijing; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; Guangzhou Museum of Art, China; and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Ji Dachun has participated in important biennials such as the Venice Biennale and the Gwangju Biennial.