Jia Aili: 'Paintings in themselves always lack something. This dislocation or deconstruction a single composition, manages to evoke what I feel is missing in the spaces in between, the absence of what should be there which is now there for the viewer to imagine.

Jia Aili is a conscientious. obsessive artist who works in the constant belief that his art has to be better: if not. it gets destroyed-utterly-and he begins all over again. Primarily painter. he is also known to take paint beyond the realm of7 of conventional flat surfaces and to apply it to objects large and small. as well as to paper. boards. pieces of card or anything else that comes to hand.

Jia Aili derives particular pleasure from experimenting with non-traditional. even unconventional. materials in an unrelenting search to find the best means of expressing his ideas. Jia Aili's recent experiments include multi-mlti-media Installations that introduce moving images to a rich array of drawn. painted and assembled spatial compositions. Given the perfection he seeks in his paintings. Jia AILi habitually works vigorously at first in sketch-mode. mapping out his thoughts on paper or whatever. as he tries every conceivable combination of elements in a composition before he approaches the canvas. 'I'm constantly trying to find better ways to be clearer about what I seek to express.. he says.

A lot happens in the process of p of preparing a painting that is impossible to predict. No matter how many sketches he produces. it frequently happens that a composition veers suddenly off on an unpredictable tangent halfway through. For this reason. Jia Aili's studio is full of half-finished. Abandoned canvases. Not until he has produced a further mass of drawings is it possible to get the composition back on track: to reenter the mood of a painting and complete it. This might be the following week. or equally the following year. depending how those thoughts work out on paper. So there amongst the abandoned paintings. between the scattered palettes of paint, the trays and easels. stacks of books and magazines that prompt Jia Aili's inspiration. lie a multitude of scraps of paper. tiny pieces of oil board and canvas each bearing an experimental expression. some a mere few lines. others astonishingly complete artworks in their own right and of a power and intensity that makes you catch your breath. It is this mountain of preparatory work. drawings. sketches. watercolour paintings. collages and small oil works on paper that combine to make HELLO AGAIN WORLD. Gazing at this extraordinary outpouring of impulses. we discover that Jia Aili.S visual reference relies ups upon a cast of familiar elements: a masked boy. a burning bed. a youth straining under the weight of an electrical appliance. an endless horizon and a variety of space rockets and crashed planes completing an J an aura of despair. AIt is tempered to a sense of Loneliness. of  utter alienation: a sense of being in the world and yet. at the same time.  cut off from it. At times Jia Ail.i deliberately combines incongruous painting  styles: Styles so different you might assume the paintings could not have  been created by the same artist. Yet. they are.  HELLO AGAIN WORLD. with its vast volume of fragments. was conceived  especially for HIVE but represents an extension of a similar collection of  works that was included in Jla Alli first major solo exhibition Good Morning.  World! Shown at OCT Contemporary Art Terminal in Shenzhen in 2010. That  was also a first experiment using an old form of display cay case rarely seen in art  museums today. But as Jia Aili reconsiders the content and form of his work.  so he offers viewers a chance to experience the flow and flux of ideas as they pour out of an artist. in this case himself. and struggle to find an enduring and meaningful form. So we walk along. heads bowed. ,in unconscious homage  to the art before us. This act of contemplation allows us to understand  the terror of the challenge that each blank canvas presents to Jia Aili as he prepares himself to work and to transform these small beginnings into a major work. Thus these fragments of larger ideas. as yet incomplete and embryonic.  embody Jia Aili's attitude towards art. and offer a glimpse into an intensely private and personal process that most artists prefer to confine to their studios.