Wei Jia, born in the 1970s, occupies a singular place among his generation of Chinese artists. Trained in lithography at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he returned to his hometown of Chengdu after graduating in 1999 and has taught in the printmaking department at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute ever since.
“I started teaching at university when I was twenty-four,” he said. “A lot of my students were older than me. It was around that same time that I began my own personal practice.” The exhibition now on view at Song Art Museum, titled Drunk and Dream, is the largest solo show of Wei Jia's twenty-some-year career — more than sixty oil paintings and lithographs, eighteen works on paper, arranged across eleven chapters that trace the artist's life, and the evolution of his style and technique, in reverse chronological order.
Wei Jia, opening of Drunk and Dream, Song Art Museum, 2024. “Some of these works I hadn't seen in more than twenty years,” Wei Jia told us. “Looking at how the show finally came together, it felt almost magical. What moved me wasn't whether a painting was 'good' or 'bad' — it was the emotional distance, the different person I'd been when I made it. Looking at a certain painting, suddenly that moment from the past became unbearably clear.” We spoke with him about the exhibition and his career before the opening, while the museum was still filling with people.
Contributing writer: Huang Xirui. Wei Jia, view of Drunk and Dream, Song Art Museum, 2024. Wei Jia in Conversation with Yitiao Art. The day we met Wei Jia, Beijing was cold and clear. The museum's wooden floors had just been freshly waxed, and the air held a distinct, particular smell. He wore a gray-black leather jacket and black trousers, his familiar, neatly trimmed mustache intact, cutting a crisp figure. He told us the exhibition's title, Drunk and Dream, captures a state in which the sensory and the rational are interwoven on the canvas.
“The curator Bao Dong feels that my earliest work reads almost like a depiction of dreams — more romantic, more personal, driven by instinct,” Wei Jia said. “The recent work is closer to a state of being 'drunk' — contradictory and harmonious at once.” Wei Jia, view of Drunk and Dream, Song Art Museum, 2024. Wei Jia, Garden, 2024. Walking in from the entrance, the first thing visitors encounter is the Monet series, the most important body of work from the artist's last two-plus years.
Wei Jia began the series in 2022 and has painted more than ten canvases in it so far. He thinks it's close to reaching its natural end.
“In 2022 I happened to come across an old piece of archival footage — Monet wandering alone, and lonely, through his own lush, overgrown garden,” Wei Jia said. “By the time he was old and the world had come around to celebrating him, what struck me wasn't grandeur — it was a kind of desolation inside the abundance. That feeling moved me deeply.” Wei Jia felt that this contradiction — flourishing and decline intertwined — chimed, almost by accident, with the exhibition's title. “The paintings are really more of a projection of myself. I'm using Monet's image to get at the two sides of the same coin: splendor and its dissolution.”
Wei Jia, Will I Still Love You Tomorrow?, 2001. Wei Jia, view of Drunk and Dream, Song Art Museum, 2024. Further in, through Gallery 2 and Gallery 3, down to the ground-floor galleries, the show continues to move backward through time. At the start of Wei Jia's career, lithography was his primary medium — a way of making images very different from painting. The artist first confronts a stone slab; through drawing, etching, and printing on that stone, the image is finally realized. Almost everything happens according to a plan laid out in advance.
Often, Wei Jia would have a new idea he couldn't act on immediately. He began making lithographs in 1998 and spent years refining his approach, until in 2002 he finally found the core of his method — achieving a full, rich image with the fewest possible plates and colors. Wei Jia, Superman, 2002. “Superman, from 2002, has stayed with me. Before I made that piece, I'd spent about three months in bed — I'd hurt my foot in an accident and needed a lot of stitches, and I couldn't move forward on any work. For someone who makes things, that's a devastating position to be in.
So the figure bursting out of the window in that painting is me — trying to break out of a state of confinement.” Superman is, by most measures, one of the most fully realized works of Wei Jia's lithography period. But the year after he finished it, 2003, he began searching again for himself within painting. Wei Jia, view of Drunk and Dream, Song Art Museum, 2024. Wei Jia, Night and Day — Day, 2004. “I felt the whole method behind printmaking was too rational. There were no accidents — before you'd even finished a piece, you already knew what the outcome would look like. That kind of work, without any charge of surprise, wasn't something I could keep doing.”
For Wei Jia, the appeal of making art lies precisely in what can't be controlled.
“I think it's only in a kind of tightrope-walking state that an artist's latent energy and creativity really get activated,” he said. Night and Day — Day is typical of this exploratory period: though he had shifted media, working now in oil on canvas, the texture and color logic of lithography still lingered in the image. The artist doesn't shy away from discussing this phase. “It was a necessary part of finding my way,” he said, “and also a reflection of my own limitations at the time.”
Wei Jia, view of Drunk and Dream, Song Art Museum, 2024. Wei Jia, Flower Boy I, 2006. Wei Jia, On Horseback, 2006. From a boy leaning in to smell a flower, to a young man cradling a bouquet, to a small, cloaked sprite perched in the crown of a tree, to a horse standing in a gray-white forest — the narrative quality of Wei Jia's early paintings inevitably invites the question of how closely they track his own life. Perhaps he was, at the time, immersed in love; whatever excited him, or made him melancholy, or brought him joy seems to have spilled straight onto the canvas.
“What the early paintings were telling, really, was my own story — reflections on feelings, on the personal, things going on in my life,” Wei Jia told us. “The first ten years of my practice were really about the state of being one individual — shaped by whatever experience and understanding I had at the time.” Wei Jia, view of Drunk and Dream, Song Art Museum, 2024. Wei Jia, Growing Old Together II, 2008. It wasn't until 2007 and 2008 that the paintings began to shift — gaining more painterliness, more of a sense of images coming loose from control. Wei Jia learned to build a composition out of that loss of control.
“Around 2009 was a real turning point for me, in life and in painting both. Something happened in my personal life — my son and I were about to be separated, and I knew I wouldn't get to see him grow up day by day.” Wei Jia's Faraway, Pale Wilderness, Misted Woods III was born out of that state of mind. Wei Jia, Faraway, Pale Wilderness, Misted Woods III, 2009. Look closely at the tiger that dominates the composition, and its limbs seem to be eroding, weathered by the passage of history; the child riding on its back, arms wrapped tightly around it, is a projection of Wei Jia and his son.
“It represents a kind of longing I feel for my son. The tiger is a symbol of paternal authority — the child is embracing that authority, but the tiger is also slowly weathering away, which stands for how, someday, the child will lose the thing he first leaned on. It's not only our own lives that keep dissolving — so do many of the attachments we care most about,” Wei Jia said, visibly moved. Wei Jia, view of Drunk and Dream, Song Art Museum, 2024. Wei Jia, DAD, 2010. When we asked why the paintings from around 2009 have a certain darkness to them, Wei Jia said it wasn't only the influence of Western classical painting — it was also because life, at that point, felt like it had slipped out of his control.
“At the time I felt reality was full of uncertainty — a strong sense of nothingness.” He kept painting from that place through 2014, moving into a state that was deeply painful, and one he couldn't seem to find his way out of.
“My idea back then was that an artist should shut the studio door and paint — face my work, face the canvas alone, and that would somehow solve everything. So all my painting felt like a battle fought by one person.” Wei Jia, view of Drunk and Dream, Song Art Museum, 2024. Wei Jia, Light in the Clouds, 2014. But at the end of 2014, fortunately, he painted Light in the Clouds.
“It was as if you'd suddenly reached the end of a tunnel and saw a beam of light — and you found yourself more willing to open up and take in the whole vast world,” Wei Jia said. Because of that shift, in the second decade of his career he took a bold step toward what he calls 'socialization': at forty, he accepted the position of chair of the printmaking department at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, no longer burying himself alone in the studio.
“I think now that where painting comes from, where inspiration comes from, still has to be a rich, lived experience — you need a public-facing view of the world, a sense of social responsibility, in order to really improve yourself and expand your own understanding,” he said. Wei Jia, view of Drunk and Dream, Song Art Museum, 2024. From there, the exhibition route loops back to two small galleries just inside the entrance on the ground floor, where the curator has drawn out two tightly thematic sequences from more than twenty years of Wei Jia's work: 'Statues' and 'Masks.'
“These two rooms break with linear chronology — the works span different periods, but they're all concerned with the body, or the face,” the artist told us. Since 2014, he said, his paintings have grown steadily richer; his ideal is to fold everything he observes in life into the picture plane. 'Of course,' he said, laughing, 'I know I'm still a long way from that ideal.' Wei Jia, view of Drunk and Dream, Song Art Museum, 2024. Looking across more than two decades of his work, it's not hard to see that whatever changes in his composition, color, technique, and style, one thing remains constant: a careful, sustained attention to the human figure, and a continual probing of the relationships between people, between people and objects, between people and landscape.
This sensitivity to people, to his surroundings, was set early, in Wei Jia's childhood.
“Even as a kid I knew I would end up painting. I hadn't thought about becoming an artist exactly, because I didn't really know what that meant — I just felt that painting would have to be the most important thing in my life.” Though Wei Jia says he's happiest alone in the studio, he has always held a deep enthusiasm for people.
“The complexity of people is so subtle — it's hard to put into words. But I can sense it, and that's exactly what makes me want to render it with a paintbrush.” Wei Jia, view of Drunk and Dream, Song Art Museum, 2024. The artist Wei Jia at the exhibition. Toward the end of the show, in a side gallery, a video plays of Wei Jia painting in his studio — fluid, unhurried, at ease.
“Facing a blank canvas is always the hardest part. Because what you imagine for it has no boundary — but the moment you lay down the first patch of color, that imagining becomes something concrete. I often think the imagined version is better than the real one.” At a deeper level, Wei Jia believes this so-called fear comes down to a fear of failure. Wei Jia at work in his studio. “But in reality, that failure is often inevitable — especially with this kind of painting. It moves fast, but it also fails often. Sometimes the moment the color covers the whole surface, you realize the rhythm is wrong, the color relationships are wrong, and you're left with no choice but to tear it all down and start over.”
When we asked what it felt like to see work spanning more than twenty years of his career laid out together, forming a dialogue, forming a thread, Wei Jia paused for a few seconds before answering. “It's too complicated — hard to put into words. For a long time I avoided looking back at old work, because once I did, I'd feel dissatisfied, unable to accept it — I'd think, I could have painted this better.” Wei Jia, view of Drunk and Dream, Song Art Museum, 2024. But this exhibition, he said, gave him a new way of seeing it.
“Now I think of each work as a footprint. Looking at them lets me accept my own imperfection, accept the limits of what I was capable of at a given moment.” What struck him most, he said, was the way certain paintings seemed to 'transport' him back to a particular moment in the past.
“Things you thought no longer mattered come flooding back into your mind, and you feel that emotional distance all over again — a real mix of feelings.” The artist Wei Jia at the exhibition. That experience, perhaps, isn't limited to the artist alone. These works belong to a particular era and a particular self, and at the same time, they are projections of something more universally, elusively human.
“I hope viewers can come away with a sense of the richness of being human — the different facets of a shared existence that one individual life can touch on, and find something there that resonates with their own.” Image courtesy of Gu Gallery.