Yuan Jai has a long and deep connection with the Chinese classical tradition of blue-and-green landscape painting; yet through her intuitive, playful reinterpretations of that tradition, she creates uniquely fresh and surprising visions of an alternative ‘natural’ world. Yuan also draws inspiration from folk traditions, in particular Chinese paper-cuts, using their formal elements as a foundation for a creative restructuring in a range of presentations, from collage to painting. In the world of Yuan’s art, there is no distinction between dream and reality; in her vibrant, vividly coloured ink-and- brush paintings we see animals, fairies, and myriad fantastical flowers integrated into a weightless, timeless land of marvels. Yet an important element of Yuan’s stylistic approach is the way she employs the accouterments of realism to conjure the world of her own imagination, an approach that reveals both her conceptual process and her ambition to break new ground in the realm of figurative painting.

Yuan Jai’s ink-and-brush paintings have a beauty all their own, both ornate and refined. She wanders at will through the territory of classical elegance, and weaves her phantasmagorical imagery from threads plucked from the visual history of the ancient and the modern, the Chinese and the Western. Her works are poetic compositions on the theme of the increasingly distant culture of ink painting, revealing a uniquely feminine delicacy and sensibility even as they conjure forth powerfully evocative, fantastical worlds. (Yuan Jai – Year of Abundance, Hanart TZ Gallery)

-Hanart TZ Gallery

Image: © Yuan Jai
When Fortune Knocks
2013
Ink and colour on silk
137 x 90cm