Zhong Jinpei graduated from China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2009. There, he created a series of urban-themed works in the course of his graduation. What makes Zhong different from other youths is that he didn’t want to reproduce the city as a whole or its details, nor did he want to refract his self-consciousness or memories regarding an urban landscape. What he wanted was to construct his own conception of a city. He used a method similar to architectural renderings to immaculately construct his own image composed of abstract lines. This kind of drawing method suggests a hint of “obsessive-compulsive disorder”. Zhong has strengthened the reflective surface to encompass the “light pollution” effect of glass buildings in the city. Not only does the reflective surface give off a sense of vertigo, it also eliminates sentimental qualities of the city to demonstrate the questions and reflections people have about the urban lifestyle.

As a sort of questioning and reflection, Zhong is not particularly nostalgic about the noisy urban lifestyle.  He chose to leave Beijing and head back to his homeland of Yangjiang in Guangdong. Yangjiang may be just a small city located at the junction of Guangdong and Guangxi, but it also holds an important place in China’s contemporary art history. Many people know it as the place where the “Yangjiang Group” (阳江组) came into being. On one hand, Zhong wields the “Kung fu” of his vigorous academic art training. Yet, on the other hand, he also brings with him the non-traditional spirit of the Yangjiang Group, which emphasizes on “experimentation” and “new breakthroughs”. Zhong was very willing to launch various “experiments” at the start, like a staggering child that has only begun to walk independently without looking back. Motivated by their interests in certain materials, artists tend to attempt numerous ideas in every way they can. They sometimes even “mix” vastly incompatible materials together. Zhong was also engrossed in the creation of imagery art and used photography to portray his compelling “story”.

“Yangjiang” is not only a city to Zhong, but also an authentic scene of life. Serving as an prime example of China’s urbanization trend, “Yangjiang” has seen changes that are arguably more intense than many of China’s third-tier cities, or even metropolises such as “Beijing”, “Shanghai”, or “Guangzhou”. As a city dweller, Zhong has shed his “apathetic” skin in favor of “taking a walk in someone else’s shoes”. With a new identity and a change in perspective, he started to make detailed observations regarding these changes.  As a result, he has received an “inner jolt” to his heart. When Zhong creates art, he does not use straightforward techniques. Artists greatly desire to leave behind general descriptions or elaborations, and use their unique form of self expression to provide additional descriptions and summaries. Zhong strives to evolve various inner sentiments into a kind of visualized texture. The processing of this kind of sentimental texture undoubtedly corresponds to the “urban” cities series he created for his graduation project.

Zhong uses “The Silence After Happiness” to coin his series of artwork. It is seemingly full of poetic sentiments, but it is vastly different in reality. Artists are evidently not “singers”. Instead, they are like “passerbyers” who encompass a sense of apathy, ridicule, and humor. Based on the previous phase of experimenting with materials, Zhong “jokingly” created various planes of texture, incorporating an assortment of colored grids into an uneven texture. From the surface, Zhong Jinpei’s artwork often inspires people to think of bed sheets, curtains, tablecloths, and other everyday textiles. Embodying an evident theme of everyday life, it corresponds to our life experiences. The ubiquitous “wrinkles” represent the “tangles” and the act of being “tangled”, which acts to destroy various orders. Zhong pairs the disorder of “wrinkles” with the order of “grids” to establish a paradox that symbolizes the contradicting conflicts in our life. In other words, Zhong Jinpei uses a virtual artistic statement to explain the being of contemporary life, – like what he deeply experienced in Yangjiang – “the change of disorder and its infringement on orderly life”. From “The Silence After Happiness”, we can feel the “incompatibility” of Zhong in his creation of art, and the aesthetic “happiness” that conceals the mysterious wisdom of not abiding to conventions.