Ce JIAN

Ce Jian’s work delves into the physicality of bodies and the illusionistic methods used to represent them. Across her paintings, drawings, and installations, she explores the intersection of body and space, navigating between organic growth and technical construction. Drawing from historical pictorial traditions, she reinterprets them within the framework of contemporary digital visual culture. Her work centers on the artificial structure and aesthetics of technologically transformed bodies, whether human figures or objects, employing diverse approaches to highlight their distortion and hybridization.

Ce Jian views painting as a historically rich medium that encodes both knowledge and emotions. She strives for a visual language that reflects the complexity of today’s image-saturated world. Throughout her practice, she underscores painting’s dual nature as both a tangible entity and a virtual window. Within her compositional framework, Ce Jian’s paintings reveal their own physical presence through textured, layered surfaces that combine geometric clarity with expressive gestures, color fields, and delicate drawings.

In her recent works, Ce Jian creates hybrid figures inspired by mythological beasts from European culture. These fantastical creatures are modeled in the likeness of industrial robots, blending technical components with elements drawn from art and natural history. Through fluid metamorphosis, Ce Jian explores the boundaries between the human and non-human, the biological and mechanical. She particularly focuses on the gendered concept of monstrosity, evident in both classical mythology and modern technology, where sphinxes and cyborgs converge as menacing figures characterized by their formidable composite bodies and enigmatic intelligence. The focus on the intersection between history and futurism is a central theme in her work.

Ce Jian was born in 1984 in Shandong Province, China and moved to Germany in 1988. She studied at Goldsmiths College, London from 2006-2007 and graduated in 2008 from the Berlin University of the Arts. She also earned a Magister Artium degree in Art History from the Humboldt-Universität and Freie Unversität Berlin in 2009. She received a PhD in Art and Visual History from Humboldt-Universität of Berlin in 2017. Her recent solo exhibitions include Belly of the Beast, WHITE SPACE, Beijing, China (2023); Paradise, WHITE SPACE, Beijing, China (2021); Words of Art, Yell Space, Shanghai, China (2019); Armada, WHITE SPACE, Beijing, China (2018); Bannermen, Gallery SU, Seoul, Korea (2018); Transeuropa, Whiteconcepts, Berlin, Germany (2017); CAPTCHA, Galerie Philine Cremer, Dusseldorf, Germany (2017); The Grand Illusion, WHITE SPACE, Beijing, China (2016); Elephant, NON Berlin, Berlin, Germany (2016). Recent group exhibitions include From Body to Dream, Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel (2023); Painting Unsettled, UCCA Edge, Shanghai, China (2023); The Situation is Excellent, GLUE, Berlin, Germany (2022); The Hearing Trumpet, Galerie Marguo, Paris, France (2022); Sonderlage, Lage Egal, Berlin, Germany (2021); El Lissitzky’s Rooms, Surplus Space, Wuhan, China (2020); A World in a Grain of Sand: Mapping Shapes and Sites for Social Deometries, Atlantis, Sanya, China (2018); Art Patrons, Qiao Space, Shanghai, China (2018); The Second Self, Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany (2017). She currently lives and works in Berlin.