The great sea voyages made it possible for mankind to cross breed the strawberry we see today. Theses plump, heart-shaped, red berries, are carefully selected and neatly arranged in fruit stores, and even their green pores seem to be distributed evenly on the surface as if by rational design. Are all of these the result of artificial processing and selection? I’m attracted to pictures of malformed strawberries online, some being quite grotesque. There are many reasons for such deformation — one might even claim that abnormality is normal for strawberries. (rumors on the web say strawberries are the dirtiest fruit). Yet when we talk about their taste, color, and shape, it feels like we are describing something synthetic (such as the strawberry-flavored essence)… There is a saying, I recall, lovely girl’s poop is strawberry-flavored.

-Jin Ningning 2021

CLC Gallery Venture is pleased to announce the opening of Jin Ningning’s Solo Exhibition “Strawberry Stawberry” on August 7th. It will last until September 12th, 2021. The theme of Strawberry aims to conjure the big picture that the fruit brings to our imagination —— standardization, progress, modern comfort, beauty, unblemished, innocuous —— desired qualities for commodity or lovely women. Yet the typo in the title gives away the truth behind artificial perfection. Applying the idioms of street graffiti, the paintings depict the massive scale of demand for Glamour and society’s manufacture for such a demand, the systematic shaping, screening and elimination of nature/body by the industry and the capital. Even in painting, the handling of on-site and spatial elements are integral part of Jin Ningning’s creations. He’s capable of imagining and often borrows the power of viewers’ body and mind to help tear apart the boundary between mediums, so the old and the new, the 3 dimension and the flatness may spontaneously re-mediate in both forward and backward fashion.

Drawing/painting in an undivided sense, is Jin Ningning’s material to express his primordial and unprocessed feelings. From this point of departure, he would create anything that can interact with time and space. He believes that this output of energy will afford him deeper levels of correspondence, because for him the act of drawing/painting is corporeal as much as spiritual. Jin’s works and events were shown in solo and group exhibitions at CLC Gallery Venture, Taikang Space, UCCA Lab, and Star Gallery in Beijing, Sandwich Space in Bucharest, LISTE Art Fair in Basel, PSA Museum, Samepaper Book Store, ALL Club in Shanghai, V&A Museum in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and others. His architecture and interior design are implemented at ZUCZUG concept store in Shanghai and artist run space C5CNM in Beijing 798. He lives and works in Shanghai.