Kang Jianfei was born in Tianjin in 1973, and his life has always revolved around school. Since completing undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, he has remained there as a member of the faculty. As a contemporary artist, the unique significance of Kang Jianfei is that he has not wasted his talents on superficial social issues. Instead he has focused all of his efforts on the hidden and inveterate illness that lies within Chinese social mores. Kafka turned a man into a cockroach to decry the alienation of man, while Kang Jianfei has made use of a controlled form of mockery, wittily maintaining aloofness. His images carry the rich expressions of the Chinese literati tradition, and his painting language shines with sharp ideas and concepts.

An Allegorical Chess Game of Life: 2008 Works

Since 2008, Kang Jianfei has shifted from his focus on the state of the individual during the birdman period towards observation of group pathology and the current problems of society. He has created individual images on roughly one hundred different blocks. They include images symbolic of social status, such as a chair, as well as a deer's head, a panda-like beast baring its rear and a birdman with fists clenched and wings spread. Each form is like a chess piece from the game of life. They all have a strong desire to live and are ready to make trouble. Kang Jianfei has reached a level of freedom that resembles that found in a game of chess: he arranges and prints the images according to the needs of the picture, and the various states of life flow out freely. Some of these images form towers to the sky (perhaps alluding to a ladder of increasing social status), some depict lascivious women with bird beaks sprouting out of their heads (perhaps an allusion to women who have to scheme their way through a male society?)¡­ This series is like a set of pictorial riddles that reflect the absurdity of contemporary existence and the perversion of the power structure.

Kang Jianfei's Oil paintings
Kang Jianfei's oil paintings are intertwined with his path of liberation that has at its core conceptual printmaking. The former keeps watch over a more gloomy and meditative wasteland, showing a spiritual world on a heavier, even melancholy level, showing a pure idealist's deep desire for salvation in this desolate era; when compared to the lighthearted playfulness of his woodcuts, we can see the eccentric variations of the artist Kang Jianfei as the mantle bearer of Chinese classical literati.

Fashion Dance_
Woodcut_Edition of 1_66.5x50cm_2008

Looking for Power_
Woodcut_Edition of 1_120x80cm_2008

Successional Landscape No.4_
100x240cm_ Oil on Canvas_2008