True Fantasy: The Artistic Spirit of Jing Yuchao 

by Gu Zhenqing 

After graduated from Central Academy of Fine Art, Jing Yuchao is continuously attempt to find an possibility to experience and express freely on the premise of the mingle between Chinese and European culture. Therefore he keeps changing the starting point and alternately practices multilateral art topics and forms. For more than a decade, although experienced irresolution and accumulation of mannerism, Jing has got amazing concentration and mindfulness on the application of personal artistic language. From the imagination of aesthetism to the expression of tragic life, Jing ceaselessly varies his narrative resorts and image languages, and engages in the integration of unconstraint and sensitive expression of the brushwork along with the aesthetics of traditional Chinese literati. In the exhibition "Jing·Realm" which presented a series of works about Chinese mythology, Jing adopted exquisite stroke and concise structure to create the alienate, ethereal and fantastic sensation which echoes the traditional Chinese artistic spirit.

In the recent years, Jing Yuchao speeded up the experiments on canvas. In his poignant wonderland of art, varies of elfin creatures are always emerged incisively. His representation gradually brings out a kind of visual power which reached our subconsciousness and then sinks deep into our hearts. On the level of techniques and form fusing together, Jing Yuchao generates an individual experience from his unique painterly language and subtle hand fell.

The respect for the sensory perception is often the precondition of artists' aesthetical practice. By embedding visual metaphor, Jing Yuchao's works are attractive in terms of the evocation of viewers' perceptual experience and resonance. His ability of applying visual metaphor is based on his own sensory experience as well as his development of perceptual images. After years of visual accumulation, Jing is adept in extracting allusive elements from his own experience of ethics and aesthetics, and then shaped into visual presentation similar to a kind of paradigm so as to arouse viewers' perceptivity and imagination. 

In Jing Yuchao's new series Friday, he persists with his murky grey style. He created a series of boxers in order to put emphasis on the exploration of modern psychology in the mass consumption society. The figures with weak body, flaccid muscle and dispirited expression are widely divergent with the conventional image of a boxer. The only hint on their identity is the aggressive boxing gloves which seem to be quite improper. The powerless, helpless and weak figures are covered by insubstantial background. The ethnical image as "The Weak" they represented is undoubtedly a visual contract with conventional image of "The Stronger". The puzzles between real and fake, appearance and reality were constantly pointed out by his artworks, thus forms irresistible disagreements and conflict over and over again. The figures of boxers are actually a subjective reflection of the tragic mental status of modernists and modern society. Thus Jin Yuchao tries to encourage a visual communication with irony and persiflage, to sum up common sense and habit of the modern life by using alternative value and thinking methods, and to interpret new spiritual crisis and psychological confusion. In Jing Yuchao's cognition, since the viewers' recognition, interpretation and appreciation of image symbols and codes is the core to aesthetic perception, the misinterpretation is actually predictable. Those grotesque figures created by Jing Yuchao are sinking in a sort of struggle, and their expression reveals the deeply haunted anxiety and hollowness of the modernists.