Yun-Fei Ji – Riding the Tiger

James Cohan is pleased to present “Riding the Tiger”, an exhibition of new paintings by Yun-Fei Ji. This is the artist’s seventh solo exhibition with James Cohan.

In his latest body of work, Yun-Fei Ji deepens his meditation on migration and belonging through a visual language that intertwines Chinese folklore with lived experience. Drawing upon the allegorical archetypes, parables, and moral cosmology of the narratives he absorbed as a child, including the 16th-century Chinese novel “Journey to the West”, Ji employs these rich traditions as frameworks for exploring the psychological and spiritual dimensions of displacement. Pulling us into a world populated by demons, spirits, and celestial soldiers, Ji reflects on the current migration crisis in the United States.

Ji translates this layered symbolism into contemporary life, revealing how the struggles and aspirations of ordinary people echo endless cycles of endurance, transformation, and renewal. Within his universe, animal and spectral figures move alongside human subjects. “Riding the Tiger”, the exhibition’s title, underscores the significance of the animal in both Chinese mythology and Ji’s visual language. In the titular painting, “Riding the Tiger”, 2025, a buddha rides a prowling tiger. While the buddha signals inner peace and enlightenment, the tiger embodies a primal force that can be either beneficial or destructive. Their relationship reflects the tensions between control, fear, and survival that course through Ji’s paintings. In this balance of control and chaos, Ji’s tiger also resonates with our present political moment — one defined by volatility, shifting power structures, and unease. The painting is a metaphor for navigating the instability of our times while striving to maintain spiritual equilibrium.

Other spirit animals that appear in Ji’s paintings, such as rams, and goats, represent an indomitable and independent spirit that authorities often seek to suppress and purge. In “The Arrest of the Goat Demon” and “The Sweep Up of Animal Spirits”, both 2025, militants dressed in fatigues restrict and round up these creatures, their captivity transforming the compositions into meditations on power and vulnerability that evoke the current targeting of immigrant communities by government institutions in the US.

Ji’s compositions unfold as intricate vignettes — flattened, vertically stacked scenes that draw from the lineage of classical Chinese painting while transforming it through contemporary sensibilities. Unlike traditional ink on paper, Ji works in oil on canvas, a medium that allows for rich color, layered texture, and a density of brushwork that conveys both materiality and movement. Reversing the colonial gaze of early Modernists who once mined Asian aesthetics for their own cultural fantasies, Ji reclaims this visual language to center the contemporary migrant experience. His paintings are both acts of witness and rituals of transformation, charting the delicate balance between the corporeal and the spiritual, the grounded and the transcendent.

Yun-Fei Ji was born in 1963 in Beijing, China. He earned his BFA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, and his MFA from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Gallery hours Tue-Sat 10 am – 6 pm

Exhibition Duration 07 November – 20 December 2025

www.jamescohan.com

Location:
James Cohan Gallery
48 Walker Street
10013 New York, NY
United States