Yirui Jia’s Brooklyn studio is an artist’s playground of opened paint cans, dirty paintbrushes, inflatable palm trees, satellite dishes, toy trumpets, and tubs of glitter. The act of painting is everywhere, splattered and hardened on all surfaces. A large tarp on which overlapping pools of acrylic have dried does its best to protect the hardwood flooring. Similarly, Jia’s “studio pants” are sealed in a thick layer of paint and stiff as cardboard. Paintings in progress are perched on top of upside-down buckets, while finished works accumulate wherever they can find space. She shows me the piece she is working on now, which is included in her current show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. In it, a massive tennis ball protrudes from the center of the canvas as a cartoon-like figure in a NASA spacesuit floats above. Welcome to the world of Yirui Jia, consistent in its silliness and surrealism, an amalgamation of the mundane and the absurd. Leaning on impulse and intuition to make sense of her own reality, Jia is an artist who takes playtime seriously.

"I used to have many characters that went in and out of the frame, but for this new series I'm focusing more on their solo presence. A lot of my most recent works are about the astronaut, the bride, and the skeleton. This painting behind me is sort of a mix because I painted pharaoh figures before and I'm very amazed by the visual look of the pharaoh's head cloth - its shape feels so fictionalized and scenic, the pattern and volume... So this figure is actually a mix of the astronaut outfit and pharaoh head (Home...sick, 2023-2024). Then there's the girl, I call her 'The Bride', and there's the skeleton, that little guy over there (pointing at skeleton painting). For me, all these characters are connected and they morph between their visual forms."

Over the past few years, Seoul has become a red-hot global art hub. Home to successful galleries exhibiting local and international art stars since the late 1980s, when the city hosted the 1988 Summer Olympics, it’s more recently developed into an “art-mad city,” as art critic Andrew Russeth aptly described South Korea’s capital in a January 2023 article for The New York Times. Some of the highlights in the Galleries group presentations are Tracey Emin’s classic 2008 red neon text piece, Open Me Again, at White Cube, which is featuring the artist’s new paintings and drawings in a striking curated selection of works by women artists at it newly opened Seoul gallery space;  Wendy Park’s representational paintings of everyday objects and familial routines that pay homage to her Korean-American upbringing at Various Small Fires; Robert Nava’s new action painting of an angelic airborne creature at Pace, that’s related to his colorful canvases of wild sharks and mythological dragons at the gallery’s Seoul site; George Condo’s arresting 2022 sculptural head, Constellation II, that’s cast in aluminum and covered in 24-karat-gold-leaf at Sprüth Magers; and emerging Chinese artist Yirui Jia’s lively paintings of figures in flux at Mitchell-Innes and Nash.

Young New York based Chinese painter and sculptor Yirui Jia has a lively way of sets imaginary characters into dramatic interactions with their environments. Here she seems to ask how many hands we’d need to deal fully with social media, while leaving it unclear whether he alter ego is feeding off her outsized phone or attacking it… From Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s stand at Frieze.