From 2005 to 2007, Jing Shijian held three series solo exhibitions of “Art Geography”, “Walking the Arena” and “Rafting in the World” in the National Art Museum of China, Shanghai Art Museum and Z-art Center. After a decade, he has launched this exhibition on painting experiment, which focuses on the visual presentation of the artist’s concern about the locality and origin of art.

The works, the earliest of which originate from the artistic thinking and research from the 1990s to 2007, present more of the artistic experimental report from 2017 and the artist tries to find the value of art from the most useless material, aimed at seeking his own unique road of art, thinking and creation in the contemporary art creations. “1/2” is another important topic of the “Much in Little” series launched in 2007, which is of great significance in today’s artistic creation. 1/2, derived from a profound artistic history and culture, is interpreted as a re-creation and has formed a powerful artistic framework and structure with its own logic and contents. It is an artistic creation upon the artist’s returning to the locality of the art and cultural re-germination. Thus, a variety of landscapes and images of the world as well as the landscape painting of the artist’s art world come into being through returning to the locality of art with people as the measurement.

What 1/2 illustrates are the fragment of the world as well as the presentation of the incomplete and complete world image of any things. Here, 1/2 lays great emphasis on one. It is one beginning and one origin, as well as one clear visual reproduction. From the early “broken idea” to the dichotomy and dualism discussed in philosophical thinking, it is not just an attempt to find out what is impossible and ultimately find a way of searching and excluding. More importantly, it is also not to find an absolute choice from the possible and impossible. Here, the dichotomy becomes a balance and establishment between the possible and the impossible. At the same time, it aims to seek the novelty of judgment between this theorem and the paradox. The problem is that it does not question the relativity and absolutism, metaphysics and the existence of things, minds and flesh, material and spirit of the two spiritual and material origins.

The simple vision restored by Jing Shijian shows that he presents intuitive, clear and divided, whole and partial, fragmental and complete artistic landscape images which are mutually attractive and connected as well as independent among all things. It nurtures the realities the artist see and it is an image directly refracted visually to the mind. This kind of image is not a simple and direct restoration to the concept of “one”. Instead, “one” becomes the origin of the natural world and the thinking of the human beings. “Two”, here, is the sum of mutual confrontation rather than an isolated fragment. On the same plane of the same scale extend two visual landscapes either split or independent. 1/2 is a vacant reservation with the whole part and the equivalent part confronting in the intersection or interpenetrated completely. And a world landscape is restored in the state of vacancy. Meanwhile, the fragment becomes an independent trait, forming its own shape, just as the vision formed by the eyes, which will be changed by the deviation of the angle. The locality and existence of the origin lies in the sign and 1/2 becomes an absolute integer.

Whether it is the dualism of Plato, Kant, etc. or Zhu Xi’s thinking and existence, or elaboration of the origin of the world of Spinoza, etc., can we seek the existence of the painting itself ultimately from those corresponding theoretical framework? Restoring the vision is the essence of painting. We can trace Ma Yuan, Xia Gui, Liang Kai and other great artists to discuss the essence of the art. The Artist, Jing Shijian, strives to re-excavate in the long course of art and classics, exploring and re-solidifying the strong visual image in the paintings of the Song Dynasty, to imprint them here at this time and engrave them between the stars and the earth, sketching out a unique kind of physical and artistic image.

Natural and social landscape presents incomparable and endless order again and again with the touching points of the linear and events constantly deducted in the scale of the time and the fluctuations hitting the outside world by means of unfolding and retreating. The perception of things becomes of a feeling and human beings, as a sensibility, will be judged by the will, emotion, act, etc. The artist endows this kind of landscape to self-introspection and questioning and enters the alchemy maze of his own to find the visible and invisible.