FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Every two years, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City features on exhibit of innovative works by today’s artists, both known and unknown. This year’s show featured the paintings of Yun-Fei Ji, who received his MFA from the Fulbright College Department of Art in 1990.

Yun-Fei, who has been living and working in New York City since he graduated, is currently a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, an artists’ colony that offers fellowships to eight talented young artists every year.

Pierogi, a Brooklyn gallery, presented a solo show of his paintings in 2001, Make Noise in the East, Attack in the West. The title suggests the ancient Chinese military strategy of emphasizing the element of surprise in war. "For me," says Yun-Fei Ji, "it refers to the making and viewing of art: displaced expectations produce anxiety and surprise, which in turn heighten the act of seeing and knowing."

Ji creates intricate rendered paintings on multiple layers of mulberry paper. Viewers are surprised when, looking more carefully, they discover that what appeared to be ink-stain landscapes are in fact scenarios of industrial and environmental disasters, or masked figures with various animals serving as metaphors for humans.

In her review of the exhibit, New York Times critic Roberta Smith called Ji’s strongest works "more original and subtle in their dualities," describing them as "the paintings that make Mr. Ji’s first solo show worth a visit."

Yun-Fei Ji came to the University of Arkansas from China, where he had earned a BFA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1982. At the U of A, he studied under the late Tom Turpin and Don Harington, Ken Stout, and Professor Emeritus Robert Ross. His work was named 2001 Best of the Season from the 2000-01 Manhattan Exhibition Season, which was displayed at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT.

His paintings have also been on display at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, The Drawing Center in New York, the Post Gallery in Los Angeles, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Lemmerman Gallery in Jersey City.

He has received awards from several granting agencies, including the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Joan Mitchel Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Critics from The New York Times to the Houston Chronicle and the Art Journal in China have reviewed his work.

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