-- Written by Wang Paopao
“Jia Yu, Han Chinese, living and working in Xining, Qinghai, is an elementary school art teacher.”
If I were to choose just one line to help viewers comprehending with this body of work, I believe this would suffice. Along with geographic and identity information, latent information is disclosed about issues, motivations, and much of what makes the work look as it does. Jia Yu is not a professional artist, he creates, he photographs, all out of the need, from desires rooted in his own life.
Since 2003, motivated by concern for the living conditions of local herdsmen, Jia Yu, camera in hand, intermittently ventured into the Tibetan regions surrounding his journeys between Yushu (his birthplace) and Xining (his workplace). Over the years, he captured numerous family portraits and life scenes of the Kham Tibetans. In 2020, he resolved to find the ranchers he had photographed and return the images to them with permission and, once again, he used his camera to record that moment when they held their photos. In gratitude for this «stranger» who preserved precious visual memories from an era when cameras were scarce, the herdsmen reciprocated with gifts of tsampa, yak rope and medicinal herbs.
The reality that binds the artist to the individuals he encounters, along with the memories and relationships they forge, belongs to a space-time that is both immediate and intimate, bringing together diverse places, moments, and lives. This universe symbolizes the Tibetan region where Jia Yu was born—at once an immutable land of anchorage and a territory conducive to the perpetual redefinition of identity.
Jia Yu’s photographs, accompanied by the narratives that frame them, convey a singular voice: that of one human being addressing another. The artist reminds us that beyond the images we master, produce, and manipulate as tools, there exists another category—uncertain, informal, and serendipitous—meant to pass from one hand to another, as a transmission of memory.
About the author
Born 1972 in Qinghai Province, China. Lives and works in Xining, China.
Jia Yu was awarded the first Qinghai Contemporary Art Award (2015). He participated in some art programs including Deep 2024 Desert Plan (Tuff Contemporary Art Museum, Chengdu, 2024) and TETRIS: A March from the Highlands to the Mountain City and the Island (Institute for Provocation, Beijing, 2020).
His work was the subject of the solo exhibition Useless Blade (Xining Contemporary, 2017) and has been presented in group exhibitions such as 1+1 (Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts; Art For All Society, Macao, 2024), BOOMERANG: OCAT Biennale 2021 (Shenzhen, 2021), Zero (Tuff Contemporary Art Museum, 2019), Absolute Desert (Xining Contemporary, 2016) and Gathering (Qinghai Biennale, 2013).
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