Hive Center for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the presentation of Jialin Ren’s latest solo exhibition, “Wandering”, on March 16, 2024 in Hive Beijing’s B and C galleries. As the forty-eighth edition of the Hive Becoming Program, this exhibition features over twenty paintings by Ren. This show is curated by Zhao Xiaodan and is on view until May 7th.
Jialin Ren, born in Shenyang, Liaoning, in 1993, received her BFA and MFA in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016 and 2022 respectively. She currently lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. Ren’s creative practice embraces the dissociation of traditional spatial structure and temporal perception in painting by absorbing the introspective moments of her own life experiences and extending multiple plausible and illusory spaces of images based on recognizable botanical textures. Her unconventional expression of seemingly ordinary subjects has created a fascinating, delicate path in the field of landscape painting.
“Roaming” not only reflects the artist’s psychological transformation based on geographical displacement during her formative years but also her ability to capture and fixate on mundane objects and scenes, through which she perceives the way the world operates, grasping the rhythms of change in her surroundings as a constant state of flux. In countless past moments, Jialin Ren enriched her imagination with what was intimate to her; she escaped from logic, roamed in her uniquely fabricated “cosmic mind,” and experienced the tremors and pleasures of an infinite universe. Such an experience is properly defined by essayist Joseph Addison in The Spectator as the “pleasures of imagination”.
Jialin Ren has established a distinctive ritual of perception in her continuous self-examination, especially when she anchors herself to the broader dimension of “landscape” and “universe” through the provocation of the “body of the plant”. The bristly texture of the snake plant’s leaves and the soaring cactus that towers over the sky become the protagonists of Ren’s first exploration of the botanical motif-over ten years of studying abroad and residence have extended to Ren a perspective of the other that detaches and examines the self. The dark and light skin-like blemishes formed by peeling cypress bark and the exposed growth rings of spruce trees abandoned after Christmas prompt Ren to connect with the plants and the fate of the individual by incorporating them into her contemplation. The experience that originated from the common perception flows along with the artist’s personal journey and gradually becomes an unveiled extension of the veins outside of her physical existence. This exhibition unfolds in a dispersed anticipation that provokes the connection with the subconsciousness of the viewers, eventually reaching a temporary disorientation in the vibrant autumn colours of Vancouver, where several threads intertwine in a space of curving lines, confiding in each other and spreading out.
