Yun-Fei Ji “The Sunflower Turned Its Back”

James Cohan (52 Walker St.)

[Image: Yun-Fei Ji "The Fan with Cloth on It" (2022) Acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 in.]

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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.

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.