空白空间 WHITE SPACE

Ce Jian’s work centers on the visual construction of reality. She examines our empirically rationalist worldview through specific visual practices that reflect this perspective, challenging their claims to truth. Her paintings, drawings, and installations explore how the world is represented and shaped—whether through optical spatial illusions, computer simulations, technological inventions, or scientific and cultural narratives. Drawing from a broad thematic range, her works incorporate elements of the history of science and art, as well as modern technological influences and their future visions.

Rather than merely illustrating such concepts, Ce Jian creates visual models to analyze our understanding of reality. Her works consistently follow a methodology based on inquiry, material research, and construction. However, she contrasts the fundamentally rational ideas with the crafted reality of the medium, where the precision of theory meets the stubborn unpredictability of painting. Through this tension, Ce Jian aims to underscore the model-like nature of scientific concepts and technological tools while revealing the reality-generating nature of painting.

Her paintings serve as metaphors for a technologically abstracted nature, oscillating between organic growth and technical artificiality. Thire physical presence and portrait-like quality, as well as the relationship between the work and the viewer, are central. Recently, her focus has shifted towards the anatomy and aesthetics of hybrid bodies, blurring the lines between organic and mechanical, human and non-human. Elements from robotics, science fiction, mythology, and natural history merge in futuristic metamorphoses, giving rise to strange yet familiar monstrosities. Ce Jian’s painting is increasingly transforming from an analytical tool to one of speculative synthesis and imagination.

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 Shapeshifter, HOW Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2025); Words of Art, Kunstraum Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany (2025);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). Recent group exhibitions include Returning to the Sea, TAG Art Museum, Qingdao, China (2024); Worlds Beyond, Unit London, London, UK (2024); From Body to Dream, Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel (2023); Painting Unsettled, UCCA Edge, Shanghai, China (2023); The Hearing Trumpet, Galerie Marguo, Paris, France (2022); Sonderlage, Lage Egal, Berlin, Germany (2021). She currently lives and works in Berlin.

Ce JIAN

SELECTED WORKS

EXHIBITIONS

Belly of the Beast

Persona and Parasite

Paradise

Armada

The Grand Illusion

PROJECTION

SMILE WITHOUT A FACE

FACT = FICTION

NEWS

Ce JIAN: Shapeshifter

Returning to the Sea: Philosophical Reflections on the Anthropocene Ocean

Painting Unsettled

Super Fusion: 2021 Chengdu Biennale

简策：双色舞台

创作摘录 | 简策10条创作观点

Futurism of the Past — Contemplating the Past and Future in Chinese Contemporary Art

绘画有声｜简策：抽象的潜力

El Lisstzky’s Rooms

#on paper_未命名 简策 & 程昱峥艺术家书项目《锚》

Kunstraum Berlin

Remixing Ground: Deconstructing Damage

幻影水师

On Paper One

Jian Ce: La Grand Illusion

5 Exhibitions to see in Beijing in January 2017

Our Painting

PROJECTION

IMAGR AND PROJECTION

无法测量的经验

PROJECTION

每一个别人里面都有你自己，这并不可耻

#on paper_未命名简策 & 程昱峥艺术家书项目《锚》