Ce JIAN

Ce Jian’s works deal with pictorial traditions and visual concepts that have their origins in cultural and art history and extend into today’s digital image worlds. She is interested in questions of a technically transformed aesthetic and physicality, and discusses them in her carefully composed paintings with an expressive palette and spontaneous gestures, which serve as a counterbalance to her conceptual framework.

Her art revolves around the tension between rational constructions and their artificiality on one side and human experience, our perception and feeling, on the other. Ce Jian uses painting as a historically influenced manual medium in which both knowledge and emotions are encoded. Her interest in illusionism, camouflage and perspective – whether in a spatial construction, anamorphosis or stage design – stems from this. She plays with the double status of the physical and virtual presence of her paintings, which is why the exhibition space is also included in a fusion of reality and pictorial reality.

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 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 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 and Beijing.