Strangers

"Jia Yu, Han Chinese, living and working in Xining, Qinghai, is an elementary school art teacher."

 

If I were to choose just one line to help viewers connect with this body of work, I believe this would suffice. This simple sentence conveys not only the creator’s geographic and personal identity but also holds implicit themes, motivations, and much of the underlying reason behind the distinctive nature of his work.

 

If there's another layer to this statement I’d want viewers to sense, it might be this: he is not a professional artist. His creations, his photography, stem entirely from the necessity, from desires rooted in his own life.

 

Since 2003, motivated by concern for the living conditions of local herdsmen, Jia Yu, camera in hand, intermittently ventured into the Tibetan regions surrounding his journeys between Yushu (his birthplace) and Xining (his workplace). Over the years, he captured numerous family portraits and life scenes of the Kham Tibetans. Then in 2020, as a form of emotional reciprocation, he resolved to find those herdsmen he had once photographed, return the pictures to them, and, with their consent, record the moment they held those photographs once again. In gratitude for this "stranger" who preserved precious visual memories from an era when cameras were scarce, the herdsmen reciprocated with gifts of tsampa, butter, yak rope, medicinal herbs, and more...

 

In this series of visual works titled The Strangers, Jia Yu, along with the individuals he encounters, the reality, recollections, and bonds he endeavors to engage or infiltrate, are not the world constructed, presumed, and sanctioned by visual discourse in exhibition spaces and media. Rather, they embody the here and there, then and now, she, he and he, him and I, them, myself, and us. It is the immutable yet self-defining and discretely embraced the reality of life that, Jia Yu drew his first breath and dwells in the Tibetan regions. This is his scene, his surroundings, his intimations and reflections, yet an existence beyond his capacity to designate. These seemingly quotidian yet alien encounters repeat incessantly, manifesting time and again, devoid of symbols and structures that can be effortlessly resolved. They are expectant, amicable, yet occurrence perpetually evolving into occurrences themselves.

 

As we complain about the excess of images in 2024, so pervasive and prolific that they have submerged and thoroughly saturated us—permeating our cognition, behavior, and imagination—even the burps released by AI and so-called deep learning after their greedy consumption are tinged with the flavors of pixels, hyper-realistic simulation, and exacting detail. As we grow more accustomed to this glut, Jia Yu's 7-inch photos—each belonging to someone, with names like Geng Sang Angmao or Zhuoma Caicuo—more clearly reveal the emptiness of our visual fullness. His photos also remind us that the fatigue and poverty of images are exposed in their self-proclaimed excess and abundance.

 

What Jia Yu's photos and their stories within them convey—if they say anything at all—are words between people, shy but passionate words, proud and grateful words...

 

It is so! We have always needed, and now more than ever need photographers like Jia Yu. If there aren't any, we must find them. For beyond the images we know, can do, understand, operate, and use with purpose at this moment, there are also these blurred, unclear, accidental, needed, called upon, passed through, conveyed, and given passage...

Jia Yu, born in 1972 in Qinghai, is an art teacher working and living in Xining, Qinghai.

He was awarded The 1st Qinghai Contemporary Art Award (2015), and also held a solo exhibition titled "Useless Blade" at Xining Contemporary, a local art institution (2017).

In recent years, he participated in some art programs including: "Deep 2024 Desert Plan", Annual Artist Project at Tuff Contemporary Art Museum (2024); "TETRIS: A March From the Highlands to the Mountain City and the Island", Institute for Provocation (2020).

Important group exhibitions include the following: “1+1” Guangzhou-Macao Cross-city Art Exhibition, Art Museum, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts / Art For All Society, Guangzhou / Macao (2024); "Go to the Ground", Public Art Program, AC Box, Chengdu (2023); "BOOMERANG - OCAT Biennale 2021", Shenzhen (2021); "Zero", the Opening Exhibition of Chengdu Tuff Contemporary Art Museum (2019); "Ethereal Capital", Contemporary Art Exhibition, Xining, Qinghai (2016); "Absolute Desert", Xingning Contemporary (2016); The Opening Exhibition of Yinchuan Contemporary Art Museum, Ningxia (2016); "Gathering", The 1st Qinghai Biennale (2013); GUYU Action International Performance Art Festival, Xi’an (2008); etc.

Independent Curator, Co-Founder and Producer of the art podcast Powcast.

Wang is committed to researching and practicing diverse curatorial expressions. She actively explores ways to provide a different context and perspective for artists' creations through various languages, media, and spaces.

In recent years, Wang has been focusing on the construction of an independent project "Powcast", which began in 2020. The project attempts to promote the connection of creative, expressive, exhibition, and understanding pathways in a form akin to "sound theater." By leveraging self-media and diverse dissemination, it aims to enhance the public's understanding and attention to contemporary art, generating more creative scenes with spatial-temporal tension and communication capabilities.