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Jia Youfu: Traveling in the Mountains Nov 18 - Jan 5, 2005
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Jia Youfu (born 1942)
Jia Youfu is arguably the most innovative artist working in the ink painting tradition in China today. For over forty years Jia has spent months at a time in the arid Taihang mountain range of northwestern China, sketching and painting. Jia's finished paintings represent a distillation of years of impressions from his trips to this desolate region.
Shunning contact with the outside world like so many "yinshi" (hermit scholars) before
him, Jia rarely parts with his paintings. Martha Sutherland has followed Jia's career for
the past fourteen years since her time at the Central Art Academy in Beijing. M.
Sutherland Fine Arts is the sole gallery in United States representing Jia Youfu. His
paintings are virtuoso performances ofbrushwork and wash, combining the tradition of
massive, foreboding landscapes of the Northern Sung masters with dramatic use of color
and ink bordering on abstraction. Jia's brushwork seems free and effortless yet is firmly
grounded in many of years of disciplined practice. In this way, Jia has attained the literati
ideal of"zhuo" or naivete, comparable to the simple genius of Picasso's drawing. As the
Beijing art critic Xia Shuoqi noted, "the inkplay in Jia's paintings is so successful that it
has been said that the ink emits light from darkness."
Jia's paintings not only express his love for the Taihang Mountains of northwestern China but also the simple country life he experienced during the Cultural Revolution. Like so many of his generation, he has chosen to remember the positive aspects of his time "sent down" to the countryside. Figures and animals move through the landscape confidently in spite of the forbidding nature of the landscape. On a more abstract level, Jia's paintings represent the universality of nature. Even Jia's small-scale works evoke the eternal forces of nature. In today's world where the tumult of city living has distanced us from nature, we only need to look to Jia's works to escape to a purer and unfettered existence.
Jia currently resides in the plains north of Beijing, near the Great Wall. He has recently retired from teaching at the Central Art Academy, and, as a result, his time for painting has increased dramatically. Collected by major museums around the world, Jia's works will be published in a third compendium in Beijing in early spring 2005. This is Jia's second one man show at M. Sutherland Fine Arts. The paintings in this show were chosen on our recent studio visit to Jia in September 2004.
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