Metamorphoses – Wu Jian’an at the Baths of Diocletian, Rome
I have long maintained the thesis that the languages of Chinese art have undergone a true epistemological revolution over the last 50 years.
It all began in the 1980s with processes of internationalisation, often driven by a sense of inferiority towards the West, followed by an intense artistic production that achieved total mastery of Western techniques and languages, in both art and architecture. For some time now, I have believed that we have entered the third phase, which is one of identity awareness and an unprecedented cultural syncretism. Simultaneously, Chinese art converses through contemporary codes whilst reckoning with its own millenary culture. The protagonists of this new path are diverse, and Wu Jian’an is undoubtedly one of them – his exhibition at the Baths of Diocletian clarifies what I mean, augmented by an extraordinary resonant effect that these forms generate through their interaction with the Roman halls.
Three materials: leather, glass, and paper, interweave through the use of ancient techniques, creating a narrative wherein contemporary seriality is unified as one. The hand-cut leather, still fresh with abstract geometries, continues to warp as it dries, incorporating an indeterminacy that is the contribution of chance to the intention of form. The glassworks speak simultaneously to the European surrealist epoch and cause archetypal Chinese figurations to re-emerge. The paper, cut with laser precision, is reassembled by hand with a figuration that draws abundantly from the Buddhist caves of western China and speaks to the adornments of Roman sarcophagi. Yet the most poetic juncture of the entire exhibition, where the resonant effect with the Roman world borders on the sublime, is the work Nine Levels of Heaven, wherein the figures of archetypal animals from Chinese culture are carved into a thin surface of leather and projected onto the floor over the Roman mosaic of Hercules and Achelous, from the Villa of Nero in Anzio (3rd century BC), situated in Hall XI.
Nine Levels of Heaven, Wu Jian’an, Baths of Diocletian
This synthesis is not artificial; it is a fluid script, conscious of its own tradition, which discovers a coherent sonority within Roman figuration. The primordial thought upon the world demonstrates that in the most remote antiquity, extremes touch and speak a common tongue. To succeed in doing so in our era is the sign that the truths of art are cyclical, incarnating themselves in unpredictable ways and times. This incarnation manifests in the work of Wu Jian’an, and it can be grasped entirely without the need for an instruction manual, thousands of kilometres away and thousands of years apart from the primordial undivided unity of 渾沌 / 混沌 Hùndùn.
A beautiful exhibition held in Rome, in the only possible venue for such sonorities. A perfect installation, save for one detail I invite you to discover. An exhibition I would have wished to curate myself, but Umberto Croppi beat me to it. Chapeau.
– Arch. Gaetano di Gesu