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Overview
2018
Acrylic on canvas
Unique Work
Dimensions: 230cm (H) x 200cm (W) / 90.6" (H) x 78.7" (W)
Note: Actual colours may vary due to photography & computer settings.
Artist Statement
Armada is part of a series of composite paintings which Ce Jian started in 2016. The initial idea came from a technique known as “dazzle painting,” which was invented by the British during World War One to protect ships from being hit by German torpedoes. The concept behind dazzle camouflage is to essentially transform a three-dimensional body via abstract geometric painting into a two-dimensional image, as perceived deceptively by the eye, such as through the enemy's periscope. Jian's current work revolves around the questions touched on by these potential parallels: the material body and real space in relation to virtual bodies and spatial illusions in painting. The works in Armada deal with the illusionism, camouflage and the dissolving shapes of the ships, which appear cubist and flat as a visual surface, but are in reality huge, threatening physical bodies. At the same time, seeing them as a combinable series helps her to overcome the classic singular tableau – thus opening her painting toward a more site-specific strategy.
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Artist Profile
Born: 1984
Hometown: China
Based in: China
Ce Jian has always been drawn to the intersecting realms of technology, knowledge and visual experience, of artistic and non-artistic image production. Usually she begins with relatively concrete concepts and digests and transforms them through the process of painting, thereby allowing the rational idea and formal structure to collide with the spontaneous expressive potential of the material medium and her own hand. The productive tension between constructive principles and destructive fragmentation or gestures is a consistent trait of her work. While she ruminates on a given work concept she set herself and the issues surrounding it, she also explores painterly details as a space for free abstraction – and on this level, she raises fundamental questions regarding painting itself and its ontology.
Ce Jian was born in 1984 in Shandong Province, China and moved to Germany in 1988. She studied at Goldsmiths College, London from 2006-2007 and graduated in 2008 from the Berlin University of the Arts in the master class of Georg Baselitz, Daniel Richter and Robert Lucander. She also earned a Magister Artium degree in Art History from the Humboldt-Universität and Freie Unversität Berlin in 2009. She received a PhD in Art and Visual History from Humboldt-Universität of Berlin in 2017. Her recent solo exhibitions include Paradise, WHITE SPACE BEIJING, Beijing, China (2021); Words of Art, Yell Space, Shanghai, China (2019); Armada, WHITE SPACE BEIJING, Beijing, China (2018); Bannermen, Gallery SU, Seoul, Korea (2018); Transeuropa, Whiteconcepts, Berlin, Germany (2017); CAPTCHA, Galerie Philine Cremer, Dusseldorf, Germany (2017); The Grand Illusion, WHITE SPACE BEIJING, Beijing, China (2016); Elephant, NON Berlin, Berlin, Germany (2016). Recent group exhibitions include Sonderlage, Lage Egal, Berlin, Germany (2021); El Lisstzky's Rooms, Surplus Space, Wuhan, China (2020); A World in a Grain of Sand: Mapping Shapes and Sites for Social Deometries, Atlantis, Sanya, China (2018); Art Patrons, Qiao Space, Shanghai, China (2018); The Second Self, Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany (2017). She currently lives and works in Berlin and Beijing.
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