Projection

Solo Exhibition
White Space, Beijing, 2014

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Introduction

The exhibition theme addresses a basic idea in traditional optics. ‘Projection’ refers to Leon Battista Alberti’s optical theory of the Renaissance, which describes the relationship between the natural world, the human eye and the picture plane, at the same time providing artists with a handbook and instructions on how to create a perspectival image. The paradox between perspective and our actual visual experience is the main problem Ce Jian discusses in her works.

By setting a vanishing point and a fixed standpoint for the viewer, as well as distorting objects within its system, the perspectival image transforms the natural human experience in order to achieve a more ‘truthful and accurate’ description of reality. The problem of this aim is something Ce Jian tries to reflect critically in her artworks. Drawing on pictorial techniques that were in use before the photographic era, such as compositional principles and grid structures – which are now applied in virtual computer images – Ce Jian creates an internal system within a picture. As images, the abstracted landscapes overcome their dependency on photography and disrupt our viewing habits shaped by photographs. In her figurative works, she reduces all personal emotion in order to build up an abstract composition with the basic elements of painting, finding a form by systematically deducing it from the picture plane, thus evoking an ‘inherent expression’.