Yirui Jia was born in 1997 in Binzhou, Shandong, China, where she grew up before moving to the United States in 2015. She subsequently received her BFA from Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Within Jia’s work resides a cast of characters—many of whom are derived from popular culture and cartoon influences to anthropomorphic objects and animals. Each character has its own complex identity within the childlike worlds in which they are portrayed, empowered by the reinvention of the ordinary. Jia embraces the idea of her paintings serving as visualized narratives to the sculptures and vice-versa. The first of her family to become an artist, Jia is inspired by daily life—the personal and shared experiences, “the undifferentiated universality of objects,” and, perhaps most importantly, the humor of it all.
The fantastical world of Jia’s creation, which draws upon and re-contextualizes the hallmarks of urban life—clubbing, jazz, shopping, bike riding, picnics—to present a blended whirl of fragmentary narratives, features recurring characters that find themselves in all manner of environments, both realistic and otherworldly. This transformation of everyday objects into aesthetic motifs and uncanny configurations is a defining trait of Jia’s practice and one that contributes to her compositions a sense of whimsey and play. Banal objects, most often fire extinguishers, billiard balls, toilets, balloon animals (or some might see them as Jeff Koons’ inflatable dogs), and electric plugs also pervade Jia’s imagined world and occasionally take on, quite literally, a life of their own. Though Jia subverts and reimagines them, such objects are appealing to the artist because of their universality—the ability for anyone, from anywhere, to recognize a visual language rooted in the everyday.
Yirui Jia has been featured in previous solo and group exhibitions at Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong; COMA, Sydney; Jupiter Contemporary, Miami Beach; LKIF Gallery, Seoul; Bill Brady Gallery, Los Angeles; Latitude Gallery, New York; We Space, Shanghi; WerkStadt, Berlin; and Hive Art Center, Beijing. Jia currently lives and works in New York.