An artist who grew up in Hong Kong but now lives in Beijing, Fu Jie uses letters of the English alphabet in her installation art to comment on the relationship between the individual and society, and the commodification of artworks. She has exhibited in Beijing, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, South Korea, Italy and France.
What's your background?
I was born in 1971 in Nanjing , Jiangsu province, where my parents were teachers. We moved to Hong Kong when I was five or six. It was the end of the 1970s and my parents had grown worried about effects of the Cultural Revolution. Most of our relatives were already living in Hong Kong and I enjoyed growing up there. I drew pictures on my own and did not receive proper art training until I went to study oil painting at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou , Zhejiang province, in 1991. I returned to Hong Kong after graduating in order to earn a living as a designer. A few years later, in 2001, I was able to organise my first solo exhibition, which marked the beginning of my professional art career.
How did you get into contemporary art?
The education I received at university about painting was very conventional with training in basic, core skills but it didn't really take me to where I wanted to be. Novelists, for example, find it hard to be nurtured at university. I followed my heart and drifted away from academia. But after devoting myself to painting for so many years, I began to suspect the medium I was using was not a proper fit with what I wanted to express. At that time, I was hoping to find another medium but was too young to know what I should do. What I did know clearly was that it was not painting. There had to be other ways better suited to what I wanted to express about the relationship between the times I live in and myself. I tried different things, pursuing approaches others defined as contemporary art.
What do you think of the environment for art in Beijing?