How long is it since you felt comfortable looking at work by a contemporary artist? Your gaze – and then your mind – wanders over the surface of the picture as if you are reading a story. A story written in a language which is familiar to you. The story is not dull; it captures and occupies your thoughts. The suspense of vacant spaces keeps you wanting to find out more without tying you up in a paralysis of incomprehension. James Jean’s paintings are precisely of this kind. They lie on the borders of the conventional art world – separate from both mainstream illustration and overly conceptual art objects.     

The desire to see artists who can draw – people, scenes, or stories – has been steadily growing of late. Will this text make you want to dwell a little longer on the work of James Jean? Or will you continue endlessly scrolling through his pictures online?

James Jean was born in Taibei in 1979. When he was three years old, his parents decided to move to the US. Their choice fell on the east coast – on New Jersey. Like many émigrés, James found it difficult to integrate into his new setting. He went to an ordinary municipal school where the children felt no compunction about mocking the cut of one’s eyes, an unusual accent, or any other traits that stood out. Even the name ‘James’ did not save him from persecution – there were two other children of Asian descent at the same school, and both were likewise called ‘James’. Evidently, their parents had thought that by giving their children an average American name they would make it easier for them to adapt. But the result was merely the creation of a general type. It was possibly this experience of failing to become part of a group that compelled James Jean to retreat into fantasy worlds of his own – worlds which emerged from beneath his own pencil. He spent all his time drawing:

As well as drawing, James was passionate about music. He was determined to play the trumpet well, so spent all his free time in the basement of his house conjuring sounds from his instrument. But when the time came to go to university, James swapped music for fine art. He entered the School of Visual Arts in New York, graduating in 2001 with a diploma as an ‘artist/illustrator’. His career as an artist began with commercial illustrations. Even as a schoolboy, his dream had been to do something involving draughtsmanship provided that it was paid work – a refreshingly healthy approach to the idea of turning an ability to draw into a profession (the opposite of the concept of the poor artist that has taken root like weeds in the minds of people of talent).

In spite of being turned down for work by several book publishers, James was able to obtain positions at Marvel and The New York Times, even if only for a short time. He was next noticed and lured by DC Comics. He drew covers for the Batgirl, Monolith, and Fables series of comics, among others, until 2007, when he decided to switch from commerce to personal projects and establish himself in painting. Despite this switch, he did not completely stop taking part in commercial collaborations. Whether this was indecisiveness or a rational desire to earn money for a rainy day we do not know, but his projects from this period made a splash. The impressive list of his clients includes Playboy, Rolling Stones, Prada, Apple, Linkin Park, and My Chemical Romance.

You can always learn the most important thing about an artist’s visual language by looking at the very first lines of their creative CV. In James Jean’s early works you can’t help noticing that the quest for his own signature style was chaotic. He was never going to impress many people with Odalisque, the classical subject he depicted in his last years at university, but his compositions showing a multiplicity of figures were more curious for their atmosphere of troubling fantasy, which was to be continued in all his following works (Singer, Clown, 2000). We can even find him turning to the figure of the shooter (Shooter, 2000), a theme he would later revisit in sculpture as he moved far from the figurative paintings he had created as a student.

It is noticeable how Jean wavered between the American realist manner passed on to him from the New York art school; pop art of the kind that has captured US galleries; the aesthetic of comics bought from the kiosk near his house; and subjects taken from ancient Chinese or Japanese scrolls which had lodged somewhere in the subconsciousness. Clearly, he had difficulty making up his mind, so initially he created several versions of a picture - taking a lotus, for instance, and painting it in two interpretations: in the tradition of Chinese painting with a typical  background in a single shade, subtle, semi-transparent chromatic washes, and pure graphic lines, and in the style of a phantasmagorical cartoon too creepy ever to be made by Disney (Lotus, 2001). Of course, it takes time to heal from the restrictive post-academic trauma, but having the guts not to choose a single vector but to combine all these cultural strata certainly helps an artist find ‘something that is their own’.

Personally, I think one of his most expressive attempts at unification was Butoh (2001). The subject here is the Japanese dance theatre Butoh (舞踏), known for its extreme corporeal (and not just corporeal) transformations and strange, hyper-slow, hyper-controlled choreography. You could call this form of choreographic art ‘performative practice’: to get into their roles, the dancers put themselves through disciplines that are almost as severe as those of Marina Abramovic.   

Jean splashes onto his canvas an array of associations, emotions, and sensations that derive from dance performance. The stream of consciousness is flattened into a coagulation of images which is on the point of bursting due to the absurdity of what fills it – multiplying madcaps, Buddhist masks, Baroque cherubim, scenes taken from westerns, geometrical abstract shapes, Booms and Bams from comics. The canvas is a silent and simultaneously loud flash – precisely the sound made by butoh theatre. In spite of this piling up of images, Jean manages to preserve what is specific to performance as a genre – its narrative nature. This is narrative that is grotesque, hyperbolized, strange. Something is happening, occurring, here and now – only we just don’t yet know what it is precisely.

Here Jean puts together his own version of surrealistic collage painting, combining the somnambulistic language of Neo Rauch with symbols taken from American pop culture, but does not yet go so far as to allow his approach to be taken over by superflat and its stylistic requirements. The same cannot be said of his next pictures. It is impossible not to notice that the figurative language in Jean’s work, including his very latest works, has been substantially sharpened by the superflat aesthetic. The manifesto of superflat art published by Takashi Murakami in 2001 influenced Jean’s tactic of combining western and oriental art and high and low culture. However, unlike his fellow artists, Jean took the proportion of borrowing and ‘erosion of boundaries’ proclaimed by canonical superflat art and gave it a good shake. 

The light, open colours, fantastical creatures and beasts, together with the overall infantile atmosphere of these works, could easily give you the impression that these are ‘simply beautiful pictures for a background image’ or ‘just another standard piece of neo-pop art’ – but this would be a mistake. Jean furnishes his characters with personal stories and his pictures with plots. In works by Takashi Murakami or Yoshimoto Nara we see tens and hundreds of iterations of one and the same image, an established and finished phenomenon which these artists analyse, criticize, or reassemble, offering us a new point of view. Whether the subject is lolicol girls or the otaku movement as a whole, we are capable of picking up the artist’s message as we interact with the work of art or with the work of art and the explicatory text. Such works of art are a vessel filled with and then capped by thought.

Jean’s pictures, on the other hand, are always open pictures. He fills them with strange worlds into which we are permitted to peer and to catch only a small piece of what is happening there. His pictures are not mirrors, not snapshots, not sketch boards, but parts of a story that gain meaning when they are seen in context with other pictures. We are not looking at a figment of the imagination but being stopped in our tracks by a prolonged fragment of something which originates from another world, a world we do not know and which continues beyond the edges of the painting.

This kind of documentation and almost frame-by-frame unfolding of the narrative has existed in Jean’s works since his collaboration with comics such as  Homeopathic, Chemistry, Pickup, Flush, and Jump (2002-2003).  Not for nothing, then, one critic has described the characters in his paintings as figures that have retained a ‘cartoonish anonymity’. In comics a powerful narrative line is established scene by scene: each piece of action is represented by a picture. The mute frames come together to form a film whose special effects we hear only in our heads. The narration in Jean’s pictures is one continuous special effect, captured in a liminal space somewhere between reality and fantasy.

The narrative quality of Jean’s art both gives it a resemblance to and conflicts with the traditions of Chinese painting. How sequences of events are depicted in Chinese art, in horizontal scrolls in particular, depends on the function of the scroll and how it is used. The horizontal scroll was simultaneously an art album and an instrument to help the viewer meditate. The scroll was spread out on a table, held at either end by hands or heavy presses, and looked at unhurriedly from left to right. The viewers observed a story that unfolded literally before their eyes – and since they had taken no part in making the scroll, had the opportunity to control the speed at which the images passed before them and to fully appreciate the work’s material merits: the quality of the silk, the painter’s craftsmanship, and the extent to which the work complied with the canons. Horizontal scroll paintings were coherent compositions that were not broken down into autonomous vertical compositional compartments.

Vertical scrolls, on the contrary, were created to enable an image to be comprehended quickly, to be surveyed in one sweep, and so were placed in spots that were accessible for instant and constant admiration. They embellished walls, partitions, screens, and so on. Vertical scrolls with depictions of landscapes were the most complex genre since the criterion of their value was the drawing of both ‘everything and nothing’. A landscape, it was thought, cannot contain narrative – yet it can develop if, instead of being shown in its entirety, it consists of hints and fragments taken from different points of reality.

In addition to borrowing what are evidently Asian motifs, such as Hokusai’s great wave (Wave, 2004; Wave II, 2007; Wave III, 2013) and mythical creatures or characters taken from the Chinese astrological system (Hunting Party I, 2009; Hunting Party II, 2016), Jean takes from scroll painting both these ways of translating a story. This synthesis is especially noticeable in his multi-panel works and horizontal-format paintings, in which the action unfolds over the whole length of the surface and parts of the compositions are united by continuous lines – often umbilical cords or branches – with the landscape ‘stage sets’ being repeated rhythmically, likewise creating the impression of a single continuous space on the canvas. But at the same time, observing what is happening does not gives us a clear understanding of what exactly is happening. There is no diorama-like theatrical effect because the action is indeterminate and very fantasy-like. We can move over these works from left to right or from right to left, or we can even go round and round along the spiral which Jean has concealed among the patterns. We are unable to relate this space to ourselves since it is non-realistic, but we can imaginatively enter the figures in the pictures and try to get our bearings in the fantastical landscape that is offered to us. It is possibly precisely for this purpose that the range of Jean’s range of characters includes so many human-like avatars (Swan, 2008; Hide, 2008; Toymaker, 2008; Ballad, 2008; Haaz Spring, 2008).

Jean is often compared to the Italian artist Giuseppe Castiglione, who is more famous under the name he acquired in China – Lang Shining. In 1715 Castiglione was tasked with travelling to Peking in order to serve as court artist to the emperor Kangxi. Castiglione and his pupils invented syanfa – a new way of painting that combined the Chinese mythology with European chiaroscuro. Likewise to attain the effect of three-dimensionality, he made careful use of direct perspective where this was particularly necessary in Chinese graphic art with its habitual flatness. Jean’s works may be viewed in the light of the same kind of experimental synthesis of Asian and Western art. Jean colonizes subjects from the Ukiyo-e art of Yoshitoshi and Kobayashi with American pop art and a comics-book aesthetic. He turns Jigoku Zoshi’s Hellish Scroll into an endless pattern (Inferno, 2019). His depiction of ‘the Ancestors’ (Passage, 2019) is based on Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa with its crowd of figures.

It is worth mentioning one other notable source of inspiration in Jean’s art. In his more recent works he makes active use of subjects and even compositions from the history of world art. This is a godsend for all creative people: if you feel stuck in a creative dead end, look to scenarios that have stood the test of the centuries. This is a tactic that has been employed by almost everyone from Caravaggio to Klimt (and beyond). But it is quite possible that this series based on biblical motifs will degenerate. In Jean’s sculpture Slingshot (2015) we catch an allusion to the sculptural part of the law code stele of Hammurabi, where King Hammurabi, eye to eye with the god Shamash, takes down under dictation from the latter the code of laws.  Jean himself has said that Slingshot is about David and Goliath, the complex and problematic psychological link between them, and self-sacrifice for the sake of ambition.

Another biblical allegory is to be found in Bouquet (2017), in which Judith is shown holding the chopped-off head of Holofernes. Jean’s version is a new take on the endless conflict between Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny in the cartoon Rabbit of Seville: the roles of winner and loser have been deliberately mixed up; Elmer pins Bugs’ head to his genital organs and puts trainers on Yeezy. This is what is known as a ‘subversive remake’.

At last, we have no need to go digging in the artist’s post-traumatic artefacts – we can simply delight in his technical mastery and lose ourselves daydreaming about what we have seen. What will happen next? And what preceded what is happening in the work right now? Jean leaves the viewer room for readings and interpretations but does so in a manner which differs from the typical modernist maxim ‘make the viewer a co-participant in creating the work’. Avant-garde western art in the past has taught us to look for the transcendental in art – largely thanks to the prevalence of abstraction. The artistic elites have played a part in ensuring that figurative narrative art is now looked on as unserious, infantile, or simply as not art. And this is not to mention how many times over the last 100 years we have declared painting dead and buried due to our failure to understand what to do with it as a medium.

In Jean’s works there are no conceptual voids of ‘not-knowing’; instead, potential holes in perception are filled with a plot hook that snares the viewer. Meaning is to be discovered on one of the branches of the plot interpretations; the directions of these plots are set by the symbols which the artist has sewn into the image. Another thing you don’t often see: correct code. The symbols are added not to confuse the viewer but to make it easier to understand the work. Everything depends on the viewers’ ability to read them and recreate in their minds what is happening in the picture. This kind of perception is like asking the viewer to paint the next scene or the denouement of a short story. We need our own imagination and empathy (and freedom from snobbery) in order to recognize the characters, imagine the denouement, watch the main action through to the end, and finally immerse ourselves in a whirlpool of visions that we share with the artist (Whirl, 2019).

If the artist wants to say something, he shall have to speak. Including with the viewer. The artist must lead the dialogue, become a narrator and sometimes a missionary for his own thought who can show or at least indicate how to read this art. The subject of this text does precisely this. James Jean’s creative practice is, at the very least, a reminder of the good old image of the labouring, creating artist-craftsman – in the positive sense of this word. At the other extreme, it is an attempt to give this much-maligned role back the respect it once enjoyed. While the ordinary viewer has no problem with this, the art community will have to put in some serious work.