Chambers Fine Art New York is pleased to announce the opening on September 11th, 2008 of The Heaven of Nine Levels by Wu Jian’an. Born in Beijing in 1980, Wu graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing in 2005 where he studied in the Department of Folk Art. Like his distinguished professor Lu Shengzhong, Wu’s fascination with folk art soon led to the evolution of a personal style that stands in distinct contrast to prevailing modes of expression in contemporary Chinese art.

The fantastic persuasion of Wu’s imagination was immediately apparent in Daydreams, his first solo exhibition at Chambers Fine Art New York in 2006. His disturbed state of mind during the SARS epidemic led to a series of virtuoso paper-cuts that explored the full range of effects available in his chosen means of expression. The following year he turned to stainless steel in the monumental work Execute Chiyou by Lingchi, (a.k.a Lingchi Chiyou, Kill His Eighty-one Brothers – Our Chinese Civilization Was Then to Create a Brilliant History of Five Thousand Years).

For the current exhibition Wu delves deeper into the Chinese mythology and culture that so fascinates him, moving away from paper-cuts towards carved and pierced ox-hide as his medium. In an extensive interview with Yan An in the exhibition catalog, Wu describes his growing enthusiasm for “anything related to Old China”—not the classical China of calligraphy and literati culture—but the one of paper-cuts, shadow puppets, frescoes and carved stone sculptures like the ones found in the Dunhuang Grottoes. Fascinated with the literature of ghosts and spirits, Wu uses the linear means of expression derived from these sources to create his The Heaven of Nine Levels in which nine kinds of animals including bird, human-faced bird, winged human, tiger, frog, giant salamander and fish express “logic and power”. This tour-de-force is accompanied by two further works carved in ox-hide, Xingtian and Head of Chiyou.

In order to realize his ambitious plans Wu worked with Wang Tianwen whom he first met in 2004 when he was researching shadow puppetry. A master of his craft, Wang has been making shadow puppets for more than forty years and has gained a wealth of experience that enabled Wu to meet the challenge of giving three-dimensional form to his fantastic visions. In the face of enormous industrial, economic and technological developments in China, Christophe W. Mao remarks, “…it is reassuring to find that an artist such as Wu still responds to aspects of Chinese culture that might seem to be on the verge of extinction. His The Heaven of Nine Levels and his homages to Xingtian and Chiyou are idiosyncratic and masterly visitations from a mythical past that is still with us. Traditional craft is used in the service of an imagination that finds connections between ancient China and the computer-generated fantasies of today.”