Ji Wenyu & Zhu Weibing are adventurers who discovered and promoted new artistic paths, using fabric to create soft sculptures.
In the early days, Ji Wenyu mainly painted two-dimensional works. However, during a period of exploring the horizon of contemporary art, he encountered a bottleneck and found that there were limitations in the expression of two-dimensional works. It happened that his wife, Zhu Weibing, a designer who had been in the clothing and fashion industry for a long time during the same period, also became inexplicably tired and confused about his industry. Therefore, the most common and familiar fabric around them naturally became the material for a new type of artistic expression. They explored and discussed together, cut and sewed together, and created an artistic language, “soft sculpture”. During the creative process, Ji Wenyu & Zhu Weibing combine to become one person, and two hearts beat as one. “Soft sculpture” became their two-in-one artistic language, reminiscent of images of traditional Chinese crafts and daily life, but it is also a challenging new art form.
Kitsch and Art
It is often said that they are one of the representatives of “kitsch” art in Chinese contemporary art, but if we look back at the meaning of the word “kitsch” (German: kitsch), it refers to those unorthodox arts that satisfy the public targeting vulgar interests, it contains a derogatory connotation. Art critic Clement Greenberg’s 1939 article “Avant-garde and Kitsch” is one of the essential documents in the history of 20th-century art. In this article, Compared with “avant-garde” art, which is a clue to the existence of legitimacy in the history of art, he called “kitsch” rearguard art or popular culture. Now that art is acquiring new forms of expression through the integration of various disciplines, and it is difficult for us to avoid the question of whether art must always be so elegant.
In fact, with the reform and opening up, society has undergone sudden changes. The birth of contemporary art is like a meteorite falling in China. Artists have used vulgar and absurd black humour techniques such as kitsch and pop to critically depict China‘s social structure. It can be said that they teasingly made fun of it from a public perspective, raising doubts about whether concepts such as art and society, justice and heroes are actually not that high-sounding.
Human love in humour
Ji Wenyu and Zhu Weibing also express a critical perspective on the Chinese social structure and the status of people living in it. The work “No One Can Sit Stable” shows the scene of people competing for a red chair, implying that in a highly competitive society, everyone wants to get a stable chair, strives to climb up, and finally falls. In the 6-meter-long masterpiece “Human Feat”, water pours down from the top of the dam, and tiny human figures are below the water flow. This piece can be read as a critique of human arrogance. Although humans are the only animals that play a small supporting role in nature, they open up mountains and build reservoirs, causing nature to become a tool for humans to do whatever they want.
The human beings represented in the works of Ji Wenyu and Zhu Weibing are arrogant, humble, awkward and odd. By shaping them with a soft cloth, the satirical message is transformed into humour. In this way, Ji Wenyu and Zhu Weibing stare with warm eyes at the inexplicable and helpless existence of human beings.
Creating with cloth is an “act” closely related to human life. Precisely because they used cloth, a material that can be seen everywhere in daily life, we can find shadows of the lives of nameless ordinary people in the works of Ji Wenyu and Zhu Weibing. Therefore, its popular perspective of criticizing society can be very persuasive. If this is also said to be “kitsch”, then throughout thousands of years, human beings continuous weaving, spinning, cutting, sewing, and dressing behaviours are magnificent installation art, and The art of Ji Wenyu and Zhu Weibing can be said to be an act of sculpting “people” themselves.
