Platform China HK’s inaugural show features a new project by leading Chinese artist Jia Aili titled “Hallelujah”, an event specific work combining painting and installation to present a unique aesthetic of its genre.

Genius of his age, Jia Aili emerges from a younger generation of artists whose investigations develop and foster existential issues regarding the individual and society at large. Through his extraordinary pictorial creativity and his ability of developing alternative artistic techniques, Aili is seeking for perfection and a sense of belonging, while trying to find his position in the contemporary world. Jia Aili’s artistic language is characterized by an evident discrepancy, a tension between perfection and imperfection, between realism and imperfect realism. The depth of his art is evident in the absurd hyperrealism and feeling of alienation that often conveys.

Jia Aili’s “Hallelujah” addresses to the world around while remaining personal and introspective; the simultaneous bluntness and ambiguity of the work epitomize the relationship between the individual and his history, between progress and decay, moving towards a hopeless end of the spiritual world.  The darkness and profundity of his language is nothing more than a state of being of which any judgment is nothing but relative.

Inaugurating the beginning of Platform China in Hong Kong, Jia Aili’s work offers a glimmer for thinking: “belief”. It also highlights the new and alternative direction of the gallery, the focus of which aims to evolve around innovative formats of creative production and critical communication of art practices.

Hallelujah is a very general name, mainly because there is no superior name that can completely encapsulate or fully illustrate the vicissitudes of the centuries in East Asia. We cannot even name it as East Asia, for what we are talking now is the thing itself, and so broad a concept like this doesn’t exist in our world. Nowadays, none of us have such an all - encompassing power, therefore, it is silently buried in everybody’s heart, ranging from youngest, to the middle-aged, to the elderly, or even the dying. So, in the end, call it an objective history, in addition, one which you cannot ascribe further meaning to. The name Hallelujah does not refer to a religious art, but rather refers to to a much broader quest to embrace our history relative to the last century.
--Jia Aili