Cai Jin: Arcadia
Dates: 11.3.2018-15.4.2018
Opening Reception: 2018.3.10 15:00-18:00
Opening hours: 10:00-18:00(closed on Mondays)
Location: Chambers Fine Art
Address: Red No.1-D, Cao chang di, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China
The exhibition Cai Jin: Arcadia to be opened on March 10th 2018 will be the second exhibition of the artist in Chamber Gallery.Widely acclaimed as one of the most distinctive painters of her generation, Cai Jin first attracted critical attention in the early 1990s with her paintings of merienjiao (translated as “Banana Plant”). Inspired by a dying plant that she saw in her native Anhui province in 1990, she has painted about 400 variations on this theme between 1991 and the present day, not only in oil on canvas but also on other materials and objects, including mattresses, bathtubs, shoes, and bicycle saddles.
Arcadia differs in all respects from this festive interlude in which Cai Jin celebrated the expansiveness of her vision in a series of canvases both large and small. It is no longer merely the growth and decay of the Meirenjiao that provides the subject matter of her painting; she has now begun to incorporate imagery representing the microscopic bacteria that are involved in both processes of the Banana plant’s biological transformation. It is not easy to say whether the bacteria are harmful or beneficial, and it is this ambiguity that is just as likely to cause a frisson of pleasure as it is of fear. Turning away from rectangular canvases, she ordered 120 bicycle saddles and 300 high-heel shoes on which to paint, not the first time she has used them but certainly never in such quantity. Responding to the layout of the gallery, she has orchestrated a dialog between shoes and saddles in the East Gallery, saddles climbing the wall in a random pattern and shoes scattered across the floor as if all their wearers have evaporated into thin air.
(Excerpted from www.dianyue.me)
