Yirui Jia: Naïve and Sentimental

Jupiter is proud to present Yirui Jia’s new show Naïve and Sentimental, which takes inspiration from the German poet Friedrich Schiller’s Naïve and Sentimental Poetry. Instead of presenting opposites, the show introduces a spectrum of complex human emotions and their intertwined encounters. The chromatic world of Yirui Jia shifts away from the previous show’s contemplation of nature and changing seasons; this show is shaped by her summer travels in Europe, taking on a light, melodic tone with compositions freely flowing between the naïve and the sentimental.

This new body of work offers a layered, immersive experience where artificial and natural objects coexist, coalescing into works that capture Jia’s enduring fascination with the fluidity of perception, memory and transformation. Jia creates relationships between figures and objects that feel at once familiar and disorienting, constructed yet inevitable. The works embrace a series of new approaches, where floating forms, distortion, and painterly forces create an ephemeral world caught between figuration and abstraction.

The three sister works, Polyphonic I–III, juxtapose Jia’s recurring imagery in a surreal yet grounded manner. These works dissolve the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, the sacred and the mundane. Her process involves concealment and revelation—layers of paint are overlaid, erased, obscured, and reemphasized until figures and forms merge into a new, integrated whole. This allows for a continuous state of emergence, where backgrounds recede and reappear, and objects oscillate between materiality and translucence.

In Angel II, a skeleton with wings emerges in prayer from behind blooming flowers. Gel-like layers soften the figure, making it appear both present and distant, fragile yet assertive. This interplay of transparency and opacity invites viewers to experience the works not as fixed images, but as transitional moments.

Throughout her paintings, Jia depicts human emotions with an enhanced sense of sanctity, drawing compositional inspiration from Italian Renaissance works, where divine presence was expressed through emotional immediacy and unguarded expression. In the paintings A Naive Singer and The Maiden’s Prayer, a horizontal figure perches atop a standing one, echoing the shape of a cross. According to Jia, ‘the presence of the trumpet growing behind the figure’s back gives a wing-like energy,’ adding to the vein of religious symbolism running through the show.