Zhu Jinshi, born in 1954, a Chinese born German artist. He is a pioneer of Chinese abstract art and installation art. He began to create abstract paintings in the early 1980s and moved to Berlin in 1986. Since then, he has been experimenting with performance, installation, and conceptual art. In 1994, Zhu returned to China, dividing his time between Berlin and Beijing until 2010. At present, he lives and works in Beijing.

Looking back at Zhu Jinshi’s art practice over the past forty years, abstract painting and conceptual installation are two practices that parallel each other while sometimes being confrontational. Zhu started his career with abstract painting, but while his installation practice stands alone from his painting practice, it has also inspired new forms of painting. Only when the two are viewed together can the striking aesthetic value of Zhu’s works be touched.

Art critic and professor Gao Minglu says, “Unlike the formal rhythm of modern abstraction, which relies mainly on the charm of self-expressive brushstrokes, the expressive power of Zhu Jinshi’s ‘thick paintings’ comes more from the stubbornness and fluidity of the objects (paint) themselves.” He uses strong and tense techniques, employing palettes, wall trowels, wooden shovels, and fifteen-centimetre brushes to apply heavy colours of paint onto the canvas. The shaping of two-dimensional space and the spirituality emphasised in the history of abstract painting are not his interests; instead, his works are sculptural and three-dimensional with the effect of his materials. The gaps, fractures, white space, thickness, and paint form a self-contained visual system. This sense of monumental objects makes Zhu’s paintings not only an art of space, but also an art of concept.

In contrast to his prior painting practices, Zhu’s exploration of conceptual art, performance, and installation began in the late 1980s when he lived in Germany. He took the initiative to dissolve the existing formalist experience and add a focus on social issues. 

In 1988, Zhu developed the “FANG ZHEN” art project, in which he set up a cubic metre of linen in Berlin, Germany, and a cubic metre of rice paper in Beijing, connecting two cities and cultures through four sections in this project: display, visiting, participation, and barriers. In 1989, he created the work Exile, a homemade raft with many bottles of Chinese export soy sauce tied to it, depicting the pursuit of his cultural identity. The relative lack of public exhibition space in China in the 1990s prompted a group of artists who had emigrated overseas to open up their private apartments as experimental exhibition spaces. Zhu’s residence in Ganjiakou, Beijing became an active gathering place for artists at the time.

What has made Zhu Jinshi internationally known is his surprising use of materials such as rice paper and bamboo in his installations. In works such as Impermanence, Boat, and Tao of Xuan Paper, the physical qualities and cultural attributes of paper itself are dissolved; instead, the soft papers are given an architectural volume, lightly stacked to become complex and tough. In the open space, the art shifts from private to public, and the works extend together with the space to become a special structural landscape. Zhu Jinshi’s large-scale rice paper installation Rice Paper Pagoda was exhibited at the 60th Venice International Art Biennale’s China Pavilion exhibition project, Atlas: Harmony in Diversity, from April to November 2024.

As the earliest practitioner of abstract and installation art in China, Zhu Jinshi’s creations have shown great vitality and extensibility, and this quality continues to exist in his current creations. His works are not limited by artistic mediums or times, but rather transcend geography and differences in Eastern and Western identity, taking a macro perspective and sketching a personal history of artistic evolution in the context of contemporary global culture.