Pu Jie by Uli Sigg

"By my Western standards, Pu Jie creates exciting artwork. Although a classical painter - painting with oil on a two-dimensional canvas - he is venturesome in form as well as content. His language reaches from realist style story-telling in his older paintings to a pop-art type colour-flash in his new series, always with impeccable craftsmanship. While he shares these high paintings skills with many other Chinese artists, his paintings stand out as well-crafted yet at the same time intensely documentary of the antagonisms of today's China.

 In his older paintings, I have been intrigued by his obsession of packing information into the canvas, of what must have been months and months of work on a single painting, telling hundreds of stories without losing direction, commanding and receiving an unusual amount of attention by the viewer. I particularly find Fluttering Flags a great painting, because its narrative language is organized around a fantastic visual idea-the flags structure the painting in a powerful and dynamic way. The new works focus even more on the visual organization on the canvas. Yet they are dealing at the same time and with similar intensity with the challenges of the Chinese people today. Pu Jie has made me very curious with his intense and irritating work about how he will continue to absorb and digest and then Chinese present and future for us." 

Beijing, October 1996Dr. Uli Sigg