Within a single composition, Yun-Fei Ji moves fluidly between painterly modes. The soft, almost fleshy tonality of his palette renders everyday objects slightly strange, destabilizing our interpretation of the familiar. Sophisticated juxtapositions of color allow Ji to create relationships within these vertically constructed scenes that further this sense of dislocation, drawing us into the composition and slowing down the eye as it travels through the painting.

These latest works draw upon a wide range of artistic influences, from the stacked perspective of classical Chinese landscape painting to the work of Matisse and Phillip Guston, whose interior paintings radically dismantled spatial illusion in favor of an emotionally charged, abstracted landscape. Ji’s oil and acrylic paintings, which radiate a quietly evocative intensity, depict spaces marked by human presence, but largely absent of the figures themselves. Often, the spaces he depicts are makeshift or in transition, suggesting the migration and displacement of the individuals who live in them. When people do appear in these compositions, it is obliquely – their backs to us, or depicted in profile, and rarely in the foreground. Ji instead builds this sense of inhabited space through the accumulation of mundane objects that together speak powerfully to the present moment.