Dan Jian is an artist from Lichuan, China who lives and works in Fort Worth, Texas. After living in New York, Jian studied painting and then began to transform the painted surface into a field of abstraction that provides very limited room for narrative form. However during the year 2021, the artist moved away from figurative-abstract painting and focused exclusively on the medium of collage where every component of the image became part of a meditative, very detailed process. Jian’s desire was to construct the impossible.

Night Departure (2022) and A Tale of the Peach Blossom Spring (2021) both feature rural landscapes that reach across the translucent surface of tracing paper and are punctuated with trees, plants, horses and wandering brick walls. While the elements of these compositions consist of burnt ash and charcoal dust, the flora and fauna remain visually distinct. Between 2-feet by 3-feet and 2-feet by 5-feet in size, the artist seeks to immerse the viewer into a sense of all that has been lost. Jian expanded her pressed collage representations into much larger pieces titled And Dust to Mountains (2021) that measures 3-feet by 24-feet, and Flowers in the Mirror (2021) that measures about 1.5-feet by 10-feet. In both instances, figures and forms are diminutive but appear as multiples, suggesting that a much larger story is unfolding before one’s eyes.

For Dan Jian, the cut-out became essential over the past year. Likewise, the one-dimensional image kept growing. Inspired by the format of personal scroll paintings, where the movement of time is compressed without the feeling of an end, Jian’s collage works highlight ephemeralness, using more permanent and long-lasting terms. In collaboration with Diana Abells, the 5-minute digital animation titled The Waves Not Yet High, A Dream Floods the Shore (2021) sets Jian’s minimal, eloquent ideas into an active, cinematic motion. Visit Dan Jian’s website here.