Art Seasons Gallery & MuCCAS  is pleased to present Carnival: Paintings and Installations by He Jia, He Jia’s first solo exhibition in Singapore. This exhibition will feature He Jia’s paintings from 2007 – 2010 and a new installation made of 700 stainless steel butterflies.

Spectacular, Spectacular! A cacophony of visual plethora, toothsome colors and melancholic undercurrents come together in He Jia’s hyper-realistic paintings. Drawing the viewers into a visual trance, the seemingly unrelated disarray of hamburgers, cars, glamorous women, zebras, generic buildings, and fresh fruits are polished like multi-colored pills. Furthermore, their massive scales – easily over 2 meters long – amplify the experience. While orchestrating such disorientation, He Jia juggles with dangerous fantasies and vices of the contemporary culture.

The facets of today’s avid consumerism and the rapid metamorphosis of Chinese economy trigger an important drive for his practice. Throughout his body of works, He Jia delves deep into the notion of beauty, vanity, desire, fear, and confusion. Similar to a closed backstage of a carnival, the enchanting parade of dream-like images give little clues to what they are truly celebrating. In that, the alluring colors and staged images become a metaphor for the mesmerizing contemporary lifestyle.

He Jia (b. 1976) was born in Yunnan, China. His works are in the collection of Rolex Geneva Foundation (Switzerland), Robert Chaney Foundation (USA), White Rabbit Museum (Australia), Duolun Museum (Shanghai), and The Museum of Contemporary Chinese Art (Singapore). He currently works in Beijing.

This exhibition is co-sponsored by The Museum of Contemporary Chinese Art in Singapore (MuCCAS), and the opening reception will be held collectively with MuCCAS. Initiated and set up by an enthusiastic collector and plastic surgeon, Dr. Woffles Wu, MuCCAS is the first not-for-profit Art Museum in Singapore solely dedicated to the promotion and understanding of Contemporary Chinese Art.