In a world where truth and truthfulness are repeatedly misled by truth claims and distortions of truth, truth and pretense are hard to be distinguished. In her paintings, Jiny Lan creates a narrative that oscillates between her own fictional narrative and current or historical references. In her new pictorial sceneries, titled The World Is Sometimes Flat, Sometimes Round and on view at schultz contemporary, nothing seems to be real in the sense of truth. Everything seems to spring from the imagination. On closer inspection however, the artist, born in 1970 in Xiuyan in eastern China, braids real elements into her surreal worlds.
When looking at her paintings, one or the other motif seems familiar. This can be partly due to Jiny Lan's protagonists, but also to their media-effective images that made it to the New York Times, like her self-portrait as a wife of Mao Zedong. Or it might be owed to her systematic way of working, since every painting takes on elements of its predecessor and passes on elements to the next - much like genes that are inherited or passed on. This is how she creates series and whole epics.
The motifs are carefully chosen and often serve as a symbol, linking eastern and western cultural history. In Who is the Ruler of This World, she portrays Mao Zedong as a sweet, innocent baby while visualizing the historic horror, the still-virulent Mao past. The baby is holding a tray in its right hand. On it stands a brave soldier with a raised arm, as we know him from Anselm Kiefer's heroic symbol works from the years 1967-70. Kiefer refers to the cruel German Nazi past. Perhaps it can be put this way: both artists, each in their own way, explore the trauma of a devastating pathos, which invented the hubris of a concept of world-dominating power and finally plunged a whole continent at the edge of the abyss and that is still not completely banished.
Jiny Lan studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zhejiang, China from 1991-94. In 1995 she immigrated to Germany and since then commutes between China and Europe. She is a founding member of the Bald Girls, the first Chinese feminist artists' group, and shows her works in Beijing, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Hong Kong, New York and Paris and other places.