Description

In traditional paintings by the scholar-painter, the essential private garden often includes fields for growing crops. This archetypal detail signifies the ideal of a rural life of self reliance and finds its root in the poem “Return Home” by Tao Qian (AD 365–427), which depicts withdrawal from officialdom into a free and humble life in the countryside.

Ji Yun-Fei’s contemporary work points to the disappearance of ideals replaced by failed revolutionary ideologies in modern Chinese history. In this painting, the rural setting becomes a stage set for human exploitation of Mother Earth and depletion of natural resources under the Communist propaganda of producing “more, faster, better, and cheaper” during the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961).