Acrylic on canvas

180 x 220 cm. 70 7/8 x 86 5/8 in.

Signed in Chinese,dated 09 and inscirbed with size and medium on the reverse
Literature：Star Gallery,Beijing,China,Dim Light on the Opposite Shore,2011,p. 90&91.
Exhibited：Star Gallery,Beijing,China,Dim Light on the Opposite Shore,18 April - 18 May 2011

Wei Jia
The Empty and Sorrowful Aesthetical Representative of Post-70s Generation
Born in 1975 Cheugdu,Sichuan,Wei Jia graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute Affiliated School in 1995. The artist maintained the approaches of “being a youth”,he,in fact,was heading to “post-youth” realm. He was interested into two motifs mainly,a world of ordinary life and day-dreaming. In the recent years,Wei began to depict imagery elements from literati painting and religious perception for self-discovery. The sense of “emptiness” is one of his representations. This common motif could be traced back to his post-70s generation,which was unintentionally given a mission of leaving the past and experience behind,under the context of consumer culture,but to rediscover oneself in a pictorial approach.
The Grief of Youth,The Trace of Life
When the artist was studying printmaking in China Central Academy of Fine Arts,he emphasised the characteristics of the forms,at the time he was having experimental creations reflecting his unique quality. It came to the artist’s turning point in year 2000 as he left Beijing and returned back to Chongqing,his hometown. Growing into young adulthood,the artist became more sentimental and focused on oil paintings since 2004,as it provided him with more flexibility to be expressive. Being a sensitive soul,Wei’s works fully represent a perspective from the post-70s generation in terms of the world views and reminiscencing from the past,which made him the most outstanding young artist of contemporary art of his generation.
Living in Chongqing by himself,he had more time and room for creations which reflected his inner-self and the reality around. Elements of life exposures and his finest emotions filled in his renderings,with a composition of lots of blank space,his works conveyed the sense of emptiness associating to the Chinese literati paintings. After 2005,the artist stepped into his mature period,and during 2006-2007 he depicted brawl,wounds and blood streaks as his motifs meanwhile he named the works’ titles relating to his mental state,such as “Nowhere to Escape”,“Painfully and Happily”,and “If I could fly,where could I fly to…？”. These titles revealed Wei’s trepidation towards some of the violence incidents that happened,thus pitying the passing of time and lament over his youth that never return.
The subject matters in Wei’s works from 2008-2009 shifted from the tangible external world to his own spirits,from a group portrait to an individual one which was apparently his self-narrative. Trace of you and IⅡ depicts a gloomy ruined building,covered by weeds,while only two walls survive with a graffiti of a young boy on it. The boy seems to be looking onto the ground where different toys are scattered around；such as train sets,toy cars and a rubber ball. Looking closely,there is a skeleton head abruptly amongst all. The artist witnessed the city that rapidly developed but fallen apart soon after. He realised the consumer culture connoting violence and death,and these brought young people unexpected collateral damage. The artist,like the graffiti on the wall,saw the hopeless collapse of the social order and his beautiful childhood has foregone long ago. Romanticise the violence and wound,Wei masters the blurred lines,paints a soft colour palette for the ground to contrast the cold grey wall. The small toys and their texture are depicted distinctively and thoroughly. The brutal fact and uneasy grief of the youth that never return rhyme like in a childhood fable.
At the time,Wei demonstrated his deepest fear by painting the struggling boy,and he turned to the Western myths and sculptures to look for new inspiration. The ruined wall and boy in Trace of you and IⅡ is his comprehension under such circumstances. It is not until 2010,he revitalised and invented his new asthmatic approaches from studying the paintings by Diego Velazquez,a Spanish master from 18th century as well as Goya.
This present work is created in 2009 and considered as a significant work during his transition period as well as the most phenomenal works with numerous symbols. It ends his previous series of demonstrating the disturbance of the post-70s,a generation of consumer culture,and begins his recent one of human original desire.

Price estimate:
HKD：700,000 - 900,000
USD：90,300 - 116,100

Auction Result:
HKD:826,000