If traditional shan shui painting, a classical landscape style of Chinese ink paintings, expresses ancient literati’s wish to ji qing shan shui [abandon oneself to the mountains and water], what Yun-Fei Ji depicts could be considered a continuation of the genre and its embedded Daoist philosophy in a modern age when the natural environment is drastically transformed by anthropocentric impact. Ji’s works often portray waves of human migration in past centuries that overwhelm the landscape, reconfiguring a modern Chinese shan shui. From the Red Army’s Long March (1934–36) to the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), Down to the Countryside Movement (1950–70s), and developments in the reform and opening policy from 1978, various Chinese infrastructure projects, revolutions, and reforms engendered innumerable displacements, enormous loss, and irreversible amnesia that Ji reflects in his works. In the three-metre-long piece The Three Gorges Dam Migration (2008), Ji zooms in on the journeys of over one million people along the Yangtze River, displaced by the mega hydroelectric project of the Three Gorges Dam, a symbol of China’s industrial modernity. Responding to shan shui tradition, Ji renders these events in a fantastical and folklorish fashion by introducing uncanny characters such as a walking porcupine and other eerie figures. Ghosts, demons, and skeletons appear frequently in his paintings, walking amongst the weary and disoriented people. In Ji’s paintings, the Daoist motto of tian ren he yi [harmony between man and nature] takes on an alternative form: a story of overshadowing nature and correspondingly, the depletion of humanities engined by the machine of modernity.

Works in the exhibition: The Three Gorges Dam Migration (2008), watercolour print mounted on silk, 44.5 × 551.2 cm; The Village and its Ghosts (2014), watercolour print mounted on silk, 40.6 × 194.3 cm. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York