Edward Hongyi Jia

I suppose there is a necessity to conclude my major creative impulses and motifs. In that case, my works and my conceptual endeavours revolve around three directions: my personal life experience, the individual and collective and the relationship between nature and artificialness.

When exploring the proposition of nature/human and nature/artificial, instead of choosing a simple dichotomic approach to express the ideological yet aesthetic conflict with the natural landscape and artificial structures, I want to show that there is a more intricate and paradoxical relationship.

It reveals a historical sense of oppression, absurdity and an extreme balance between the authenticity and the non-authenticity.

Humans, on the one hand, regard themselves - external of nature, despising nature as an extractable resource. However, on the contrary, they will find themselves engulfed in nature’s timelessness. The relationship between man and nature is such a history of confrontation, coexistence, conquest, fusion, and erosion. In regards to such concepts, I create and depict intermediate states between traditional science-fictional narratives and natural spectacle: the curved mechanical structures either float in the water like islands or are embedded within forests or jungles - the energy barrier looming in the clouds like the sunset, the waterfalls caused by the engines of ekranoplans...

In my juvenile years, I have been greatly devoted to the breeding and fostering of discus fishes (S. aequifasciata). Through my devotions, my designed/materialized discus fish biochemical filtration system have brought me the triumph of the 28th Science and Technology contest of Shandong, China.

To me, ornamental fishes is an incarnation of this discourse of natural/artificialness. The existence of ornamental fishes is a miniature of human intervention and utilisation of nature. These fishes after selective breeding, have thus lost their survival abilities in the wildness, transformed into mere recreational and aesthetic purposed products and could only survive in artificial environments.

It is apparent that the inclusion of geometrical structures within the canvas is a signifier of the fish tanks and water circulation systems. Here, the contrast between artificialness and the natural landscape is depicted, resembling not only the inherit properties of aquariums but also a certain degree of the disillusionment of my past.