CLINTON, NY.- The vignettes depict a leering man with a pig’s snout, another in a rumpled suit, a hunchback hag with a snaggle-toothed grin, and a peasant with a jowly frog face, all protagonists in Yun-Fei Ji: The Intimate Universe at the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College on view from February 6 through July 2, 2016.

The Intimate Universe presents 44 scrolls, paintings and drawings created by the Beijing-born artist Yun-Fei Ji over the last decade, drawn from major institutions as well as private collections, and new works made specifically for the exhibition. These include a suite of three related scrolls and recent experimental works with elements of three-dimensionality made at the Dieu Donné papermaking workshop. Twenty-six never-before-exhibited preparatory sketches are featured as well in the survey, which travels to the Honolulu Museum of Art from September 29, 2016 to February 5, 2017 after its presentation at the Wellin.

“For more than a decade, Yun-Fei has chronicled the harsh reality of the dispossessed in today’s China employing the tradition of Chinese landscape painting,” says Tracy L. Adler, director of the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College and curator of the exhibition. “Today, he’s exploring new ground, but still as an artist reimagining storytelling in contemporary terms.”

“The Intimate Universe is a commissioning project as well as a loan exhibition. Yun-Fei will create a large-scale, three panel scroll for which we are building a special viewing room within the exhibition. As well, through the residency we’ve initiated with Dieu Donné, we are encouraging Yun-Fei to experiment with paper as a mutable form. Our aim is to capture this artist’s range and latest preoccupations.”

The three-panel scroll painting commissioned by the Wellin is be showcased in its own gallery, reached through a moon gate doorway. The work has been set within a shallow wall recess that winds horizontally across three walls.

On the outside of the scroll room is another exhibition highlight, a 60-foot long scroll entitled The Village and its Ghosts (2014). This panorama depicts the movement of ghosts, folkloric humans, hucksters, animal hybrids, skeletons and other figures within a classically limned landscape: hundreds of mini-dramas unfold, from a procession of claw footed and insect-like human figures to a young woman hand pollinating a stand of trees in a world where bees are becoming extinct. First seen last year in Prospect.3 in New Orleans, the painting is being displayed unframed, also within a recessed channel.

“Both the intimate scroll room and the larger gallery environment are designed to subtly evoke the forms and creative landscape of the Chinese garden design of Suzhou,” notes Adler. “It is only as the visitor engages with the artwork that other, more difficult, interpretations come into focus.”

On another large wall are featured 26 never-before-exhibited preparatory sketches, hung in a web-like configuration intended to reflect linkages. Created only recently, they record the movement of the dispossessed in China as a visual cacophony of overturned plastic buckets, bulging garbage bags, fallen branches, gutted cabinets, and upturned chairs dotted by improvised shelters.

New paper works created by Ji in a residency underwritten by the Wellin at Dieu Donné in New York City evidence the artist’s thinking as he experiments with texture and form and serve as a bridge between The Intimate Universe and a concurrent exhibition Pure Pulp: Contemporary Artists Working in Paper at Dieu Donné.

While the displacement of over a million and a half people due to the construction of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River is the basis for one long scroll on view, The Move of the Village Wen (2012), many of the more recent drawings and scrolls featured, including a new series created for the Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp, look to other places and times, or to a timelessness, to convey a sense of a world no longer in harmony and a present day haunted by ghosts of the past.

“We at the Wellin hope that this exhibition will provide a platform for launching a dialogue about the relationship between art, power, politics and the environment,” adds Adler. This winter, the curricula of a number of Hamilton College courses will incorporate concepts and ideas relating to Yun-Fei Ji: The Intimate Universe and the Wellin will offer programs for K-12 students in conjunction with the exhibition.

Yun-Fei Ji: The Intimate Universe, a major monograph with essays by Tracy L. Adler, Steven J. Goldberg, Associate Professor of Art History at Hamilton College, and Robert Morgan, noted art critic and curator, is forthcoming from DelMonico Books/Prestel, New York.

Yun-Fei Ji (Beijing, 1963) received his BFA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 1982 and an MFA from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1989. Ji’s work has been shown extensively, most recently with Surroundings, a two-person exhibition with Susanna Heller at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, a solo exhibition Migrants, Ghosts, and the Dam at the University Museum of Contemporary Art in Amherst, Massachusetts (2015); and group exhibitions with Unscrolled: Reframing Tradition in Chinese Contemporary Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2014–15); Prospect.3: Notes for Now in New Orleans (2014–15), and at the Twentieth Anniversary Exhibition at Pierogi in Brooklyn (2014). Other group exhibitions include participation in the 2002 Whitney Biennale and the 11th Biennale de Lyon (2011), as well as shows at The Museum of Modern Art, NY and the British Museum, London. In 2012, he participated in the 18th Biennale of Sydney. Select solo exhibitions include Boxers at the SAFN Museum, Iceland (2004); The Empty City, which was organized by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and traveled to the Rose Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2004); Great News Comes from the Collective Farm at Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp (2005), and Water That Floats the Boat Can Also Sink It at the James Cohan Gallery, NY (2006). In 2012, Ji presented his first Beijing solo exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. Water Work examined the historical developments in contemporary America and China, focusing on the impact of grand infrastructural projects and water-related natural disaster on ordinary people in his two homelands. He received the Rome Prize in 2006 from the American Academy in Rome, Italy.