PRACTICE & THEORY

    Practice generates the problem; theory gives the problem conceptual form.

 

 

 

 MATERIAL PRACTICE

 

 

Jianjie Ji’s practice has long centered on large-scale painting, with traditional oil paint remaining its primary medium. His works do not begin from an image or a predetermined form. In these large paintings, the material body may reach approximately eight inches in thickness. This thickness is not an amplification of surface texture or expressive brushwork. It allows oil paint to acquire actual volume, weight, internal pressure, and relations of bearing.

Painting is therefore no longer a two-dimensional surface upon which color or imagery appears. It becomes a material structure that must bear its own weight and the consequences of its own transformation.

The work initially develops on large canvases laid horizontally. Traditional oil paint, natural mineral materials, and multiple layers of embedded stainless-steel mesh are repeatedly accumulated, compressed, interlocked, cut away, and reintroduced. Screws of different lengths penetrate both material and support, while hands, shovels, hammers, axes, power saws, and electric chisels participate at different stages of formation.

These tools do not function merely as extensions of the artist’s hands. Each changes the conditions under which materials can come into contact, bear upon one another, fracture, and continue to form. The work is therefore not designed according to a predetermined image. It develops through the interaction of scale, tools, material thickness, existing structures, and continuing intervention.

This process usually extends over several months. Material does not form all at once. Soft regions gradually harden; material that can initially be altered by hand may later be removable only with tools. Each new layer enters conditions already established and altered by earlier material, while also changing how the next intervention can occur. What has already happened is not preserved as an intact form, yet it continues to constrain, orient, and participate in what forms afterward.

The large painting is eventually lifted by mechanical equipment from a horizontal to a vertical position. Its weight does not change, but the way that weight is borne and distributed—and the relation between its dense body of oil paint and gravity—fundamentally changes. Material that could remain in place under horizontal conditions may begin to flow, shift, fracture, or detach. Some parts fall immediately; others change only after weeks or months. These events cannot be fully predetermined by the artist.

Detached or fractured material may later be re-embedded in the work, but this return does not restore an earlier form. Instead, the material re-enters conditions already altered by what has occurred. The work is therefore not completed when the artist ceases to act. It continues to form through time, gravity, failure, redistribution, and further material intervention.

 

 

       FROM PRACTICE TO PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS

 

 

These material processes generate a series of interconnected philosophical questions from within painting itself.

When material acquires its own volume, weight, and duration, is painting still an object completed by the artist, or has it become a material organization that remains in formation?

If organization remains in transformation, can Formation take place without stable form as its endpoint?

When what has occurred alters the conditions of what follows, can material still be understood independently of the relations through which it acts?

And when an earlier relation changes the conditions under which another relation becomes possible, what kind of consequence has entered the work?

At this point, the problem begins to move beyond material considered in isolation.

Materials do not merely coexist. One material may support another, constrain it, expose it, displace it, or alter the conditions under which it can continue to act. What matters is no longer simply that relations exist, but that relations can become consequential.

 

This introduces the problem of Bearing.

To bear is not simply to support weight. Under conditions of Load, a relation may become implicated in the consequences produced through another relation. Yet Bearing cannot be assumed in advance as a stable mechanism. If what is borne alters the relation through which it is borne, then Bearing itself becomes a condition of change.

The question therefore shifts again.

If relations become consequential, if they bear one another, and if they change through that Bearing, how is the organization of those relations altered?

 

This is the problem of Re-ordering.

Re-ordering does not mean that relations merely move from one arrangement to another. It concerns a change in the organization through which consequences can be borne. Once that organization changes, the conditions under which subsequent relations occur may also be different.

Failure becomes significant within this field, not because every transformation culminates in Failure, but because a previously viable mode of Bearing may reach a point at which it can no longer continue in the same organization. Redistribution may then become necessary. What follows need not restore what preceded it, nor does it necessarily begin from conditions untouched by what has already occurred.

At this point another problem becomes unavoidable.

If form changes, if relations change, if their organization changes, and if the conditions under which further organization occurs have themselves been altered by what preceded them, in what sense can anything still be said to continue?

What continues?

Continuity cannot be assumed here as identity, stability, preservation, or an uninterrupted causal chain. Nor can it be established simply because one event follows another.

 

It must first become a problem.

Painting thus becomes a field in which philosophical problems actually occur rather than a field used to illustrate concepts established elsewhere. Material practice produces conditions that existing concepts cannot adequately describe. Theory begins when those conditions require distinctions that practice alone does not name.

The movement is therefore not from practice to theory as though practice were left behind.

It begins in painting and becomes increasingly abstract only because painting itself makes those abstractions necessary.

 

 

     THREE INTERCONNECTED TEXTS

 

 

These problems are developed through three interconnected texts.

 

 UNDER CONDITIONS OF LOAD

 

What happens to painting?

Under Conditions of Load (UCL) begins with painting itself.

It asks what happens when material acquires substantial volume, weight, pressure, and duration, and when painting can no longer be understood primarily as a surface upon which an image appears.

UCL follows material formation through accumulation, gravity, detachment, Failure, and Redistribution while remaining within painting.

Yet the further it follows material formation, the more difficult it becomes to understand what occurs through materials considered independently.

Painting makes another problem necessary:

Relations.

 

UCL discovers Relations.

 

RELATIONS UNDER LOAD

 

What happens to relations?

Relations under Load (RUL) begins where UCL must stop.

It asks what happens when relations can no longer be understood merely as connection, interaction, or spatial contact, but become consequential conditions through which other relations are altered.

Its central movement is:

Relation → Consequence → Bearing → Re-ordering

To become consequential is to alter another relation’s conditions.

To bear is already to change.

To re-order is to change the organization of Bearing.

RUL follows Relations as far as Relations can go. It examines how consequences are borne, how Bearing changes the relations through which consequence is borne, and how the organization of Bearing may itself be re-ordered.

But RUL does not establish a theory of Continuity.

Instead, its own explanatory limit produces another question:

If relations and their organization have changed, in what sense does what follows remain implicated in what preceded it?

 

RUL discovers Continuity as a problem.

 

   CCL

What continues?

(CCL) begins from that question.

It does not assume that Continuity means the preservation of form, material organization, relational structure, or identity. Nor does mere succession establish Continuity.

Its problem is more exacting:

If form changes, relations change, organization changes, and the conditions under which subsequent organization occurs also change, what permits us to say that what follows is not simply another beginning?

CCL takes Continuity itself as an independent philosophical problem.

 

 

The three texts therefore follow a precise progression:

 

UCL discovers Relations.

RUL discovers Continuity as a problem.

CCL addresses Continuity.

 

Their questions are correspondingly simple:

 

What happens to painting?

What happens to relations?

What continues?

 

The movement begins with material practice.

It moves toward Relations because painting makes Relations necessary.

It moves toward Continuity because Relations encounter their own explanatory limit.

But abstraction never becomes independent of the conditions from which it arose.

Painting remains the place where the problem first became visible.