ARTIST BIO

Jianxin Wu is a photographer and biji practitioner whose formation and survival inside the society he documents is not biography - it is the work's essential authority.

From an early age, he was trained in classical Chinese painting and literature by scholars of his father's generation — men persecuted during the Cultural Revolution simply for being educated. What they passed to him was not only technique but a way of surviving: how to turn inward when outward expression is dangerous, how to sustain the life of the mind when the world outside offers it no sanctuary. Selected for China's national athlete program and subsequently trained as a special forces military sniper, he learned a different precision:

How a small lens finds the detail that determines survival.

He has maintained a cross-cultural practice between China and the United States. Founding the first privately owned gallery in Beijing, establishing QingPing Gallery Teahouse in Boston, returning to Beijing to establish QingPingHuiGuan, and, since 2009, developing a social media art practice combining photography and biji, specifically designed to carry meaning through censored infrastructure.

His work examines what happens to human beings when a civilization annuls the interior conditions for selfhood before they can form. It is addressed to those inside who recognize it, and to those outside who need a framework for what they are seeing. The Grammar of Absence is the first time this practice moves into physical, bilingual, and international form.

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