Cai Jin at ASIAN FINE ARTS BERLIN

October 15 - November 13, 1999

Asian Fine Arts Berlin is Germany's only gallery devoted solely to the presentation of contemporary Asian art. Situated in the heart of Berlin's new gallery district in "Mitte", the centre of both the old and the new capital, Asian Fine Arts started working in 1997. Having been through a number of semantic and conceptual metamorphoses, the gallery has branched out from showing contemporary Chinese art to the whole of Asia and South East Asia. With exhibitions by Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Indonesian artists, the gallery considers itself as a mediator in the cultural dialogue between East and West. Alexander Ochs and Jaana Pruess, the couple who run Asian Fine Arts, position themselves within the ongoing debate about the role of art in globalization and on artistic statements that have arisen out of the questioning of "centre" versus "periphery". Both are aware of the fact that Asian art, and more specifically, art by Asian women, is still treated very much like a marginal art form by much of the Western audience. Presenting this art to a wider public and thereby introducing it into the international art circuit as a relevant artistic voice regardless of regional provenance, is one of their goals.

The current exhibition, Cai Jin's "Bananaplants", is the artist's first European solo show. Born in Tunxi, Anhui province, on the Chinese mainland in 1965, Cai is about to break through the glass ceiling of being female and from a country on the periphery of the global art map. She trained at the Normal University in Wuhu, Anhui province and studied oil painting at the Central Academy of Arts in Beijing. Since 1991, Cai teaches at the Academy of Art in Tianjin and has been dividing her time between Tianjin and New York for some years now. Cai Jin has exhibited widely, both in mainland China and abroad, including "China's New Art - Post 89" which traveled to Hongkong, Sydney and London in 1993/97, and at this summer at LIMN Gallery in San Francisco. A German audience might be aware of her work in the group show "China - Aktuelles aus 15 Ateliers", shown in Munich in 1996, and "Half of the Sky - Contemporary Chinese Women Artists", shown at the FrauenMuseum Bonn in 1998. It has since travelled to Offenburg and will be shown at another German venue from February 2000. Asian Fine Arts was therefore able to include some works from this show in their exhibition. This is Ci Jin's first European solo show and it despite its modest size, it has the feeling of a mini-retrospective. There are works from the early nineties through to 1999, taking up the entire gallery space.

This is not a show for the faint of heart, though. For those to whom the sight of flesh and blood is best kept away in aseptic chambres overseen by anonymous figures clad in plastic garments, this might be a difficult visual experience. Cai Jin loves the Color red. And she revels in its associations of exactly that, flesh and blood. Hers are all the shades of red, pink, and purple, from blushing pink to darkest-secret purple and a few triumphant shades of red in between. She paints on canvas, on plastic chairs, on shoes, bicycle saddle and mattreses. There is a two-part silk banner, printed with flowers, red on red, its smooth structure overgrown with what looks like clotted blood. And yet, it's only canna plants.

Cai first became aware of the visual and metaphorical possibilities of the canna leaf in 1991, and has worked with that image ever since. Britta Erickson kindly pointed out to me the mistranslation which haunts all literature on Cai Jin's work, and which identifies the plant represented as a banana plant. The Hunan Fine Arts Publishing Press is currently preparing a book on Cai Jin's drawings, with a catalogue essay by Britta Erickson, which will clarify this point. Biological correctness aside, it is interesting to note a certain amount of self-stylization in Cai's statements about her work. There is the famous quote (which is repaeted in both the Frauen Museum's catalogue and the gallery's press text) that art is like knitting, once you start, you can stop anymore. Which, for a German audience used to Rosemarie Trockel's knit paintings, sounds exactly like the feminist irony her work seems to imply. There are the everyday-household objects like the mattresses, there are the feminine shoes and the silk fabric, the rather phallic-shaped bicycle saddles and again, canna plants on canvas.

Why do I keep coming back to the plant? Because there is a certain dichotomy in Cai's work that revolves around this choice of subject. First, there is the name of the plant, mei ren jiao (meiren = beautiful woman; jiao = hand), which invites an interpretation of the subject from the point of view of gender. Secondly, the plant, seen in close-up (and there is no other point of view in Cai Jin's paintings) lends itself to a particular way of representation. The pictures oscillate between large-scale renditions of canna plants, and pure painting. From a viewpoint directly in front of the painting, the viewer akes in the rough surface of the paint, the oozing Colors, stepping back there are the plants, the monochromatic shades of red evoking a field in decay, plants having undergone a metamorphosis into decomposing flesh. This semantic field becomes especially poignant in the large mattresses which are Cai Jin's strongest works to date. The display at Asian Fine Art presents one of them hanging on the far end of the room, facing the entrance and thereby dominating the gallery space, the other sits on a low pedestal of exactly the same size as the mattress. Both undergo the well-known process by which an ordinary object which has been interfered with by an artist and then presented in traditional gallery fashion, immediately acquires the characteristics of an art object. Therefore, Cai Jin's mattresses which invite associations to splatter-movies scenes as well as admiration for the intricate interplay of printed flowers and painted vegetabilia, become a painting and a sculpture. The first brings up (again, in a German viewer) powerful resonances of Gotthard Graubner's seminal "Farbraumkoerper", paintings on canvas which is stuffed with synthetic cotton wool and thereby acquires an actual three-dimensionality and enormous chromatic depth. The second rests solidly on its pedestal and becomes a much stronger presence in the room than "Flower pipe No.61", 1995, a low plastic chair covered in paint, standing opposite.

For those of us able to travel along with the art works, there is another show by Cai Jin coming up at the Courtyard Gallery in Beijing at the end of this year.

Email to Stephanie Tasch Zehdenicker
Str. 19
D - 10119 Berlin
Tel. 49-(0)30-44 01 05 76
Fax. 49-(0)30-44 01 05 77