Ich habe Jiny Lan zuerst durch ihre Kolumne in einer chinesischen Zeitung kennengelernt. Ihre schlagfertigen Satiren sind unter den Chinesen im Ausland sehr bliebt. Diese hier zum Ausdruck kommende Intelligenz zeigt sich auch in ihren Kunstwerken.

„Bei der der Schaffung meiner Gemälde fühle mich relativ privat und introvertiert. Ich erwarte gar  nicht, dass jedes meine Bilder von den meisten Menschen verstanden wird“ sagte Jiny Lan，„ aber wenn ich eine Performance in der Öffentlichkeit mache, möchte ich so viele Menschen wie möglich erreichen, da es mich motiviert, durch Kunst in der Gesellschaft zu intervenieren und sie zu  beeinflussen.“

Durch Kunst in der realen Welt zu intervenieren und diese damit zu  transformieren ist eine der Inspirationen, die Jiny Lan während ihrer Tätigkeit am Museum Schloss Moyland von Joseph Beuys entlehnt hat.

„Ihr lacht mir zu wenig. Das ist für mich ein Zeichen, dass ihr es nicht ernst meint,…“ sagte Joseph Beuys.

Das versteht die Künstlerin gut - die Realität  ist so hart, dass wir einen Weg finden müssen, mit ihr umzugehen.

In a private conversation, Roman Signer said that he considers Jiny Lan’s painting a genuine and independent contribution to Chinese art. I understand what he means.
 
I met Jiny Lan on my first trip to China in a huge KLM plane. We happened to be sitting side by side. And we both wanted to attend the 9. Biennale in Shanghai. She was invited as an artist to the Biennale, I as a curator. I would accompany the project of Roman Signer. Since Jiny's art project was to take place two months later, she was able to help with Roman’s work. Thus began a friendly relationship, which has stabilized after the journey.
 
Later, she saved my life when I was lost in the Japanese jungle. She had my emergency calls translated. Finally, as I was about to give up, a helicopter came and picked me up off a cliff.
 
We exchange our thoughts very often. She sends me pictures she has painted fresh, I give her comments. She tells me the secret symbols that she has built into the pictures. You have to know their entire story to decipher the mystery. For example, she often paints falling women, since the leap from a wall was a way to freedom for her. This is a story she does not want to tell everyone.
 
Jiny's painting is very reminiscent of dreams. She says her life is a dream. When she is in Germany, she dreams of China. When she is in China, she dreams of Germany. The dreams come together in her paintings. The cultures overlap. Dramatically, cultural intersections tower on one another, as in architectural fantasies by Piranesi. What is created is fantastic. There are crossings from East and West. These are miraculous worlds that fascinate - and which at any time seem to be threatened by collapse. Their images never look rigid, they are always in motion. The drama is happening now. Menace and seduction are kept exactly in balance. And one image evolves from the other. Like a chain. Here, too, there is no standstill, no pause. It goes on and on.
 
In Jiny's art, there are two branches. One is performative and plays out in a group called "Bald Girls". To the group also belongs Xiao Lu, who became famous in the late 1980s for shooting a gun at her very first work during the very first exhibition of contemporary art in the Chinese National Museum in Beijing. The exhibition was immediately closed. If Xiao Lu's father had not been rector of the Hangzhou Art Academy, which is the most important of all China, Xiao Lu would not have dived so quickly.

Through Jiny´s talking, I knew she was part of the Tiananmen Square activities during the 1989 demonstrations. She said that the students had been given warm clothes and food. That the relief organizations had done very good work.The only thing missing was shoes. Her feet were so moist and she had so much pain at her feet that she had to leave the place after two weeks. Because she had not taken off the shoes for so long, the skin began to peel off her feet. So she still has problems with her feet today.  A few days after she had left the square, the tanks came.

"Bald Girls" make feminist action. Jiny also works outside the group performatively, for example together with Fluxus artist Ben Patterson. Jiny was in a yellow full body suit, Ben Patterson in a black full body suit. They wrote racist insults against each other with black or yellow color, until both suits are equally black-yellow.

Jiny Lan considers herself a painter, a conceptual artist and an actionist. She does not only display her painting very dynamically but also positions herself as an artist into the centre of her video work. Lan entitles one of her latest films “Past Future Continues”, here she casts her works of art as a moving choreography. The experimental and innovative character of the video reveals much of her artistic thinking, which centers around the exchangeable relationships between all creatures and things.

Jiny Lan grew up in the north of China, in a cold region close to the North Korean border. It may result from the wintriness, from the nearness of the border, from the young days in a China even before its political opening and also from her engagement in the Chinese pro-democratic movement of the outstanding year 1989, that her works are affected by an internal force and movement comprising her motifs as well as her scenography. Nothing, it seems, remains at rest, everything is drawn into a swirl of elementary powers or catapulted out of it. Her portrayals of humans are always parts of a scenical context, occasionally acting, but often enough also simply at the mercy of someone else, acting reactively. Using motifs manifoldly, reworking them, is important for her. They are put into a collage and painted over. In the end the viewers of her artwork cannot distinguish between photography, print and painted sections. Images and painting are inextricably merged. So to say, the viewer is dragged into this gigantic
stream of forces and vehemently stirred up. Works such as “Vorwärtsbewegung”(2013), “Within ten seconds”, “Passive freedom”(2016) or “Prophezeiung”(2014) indicate this stream of times and floods, this rousing elementary balance of power, which man can hardly withstand.

I met Jiny Lan first on a voyage to Dunhuang in China, when we were both invited to the opening of the first International Art Expo on the Silk Road together with other artists.

On our first trip to the exposition halls an unignorable figure popped up in front of me: almost  shaven-headed, dressed in a queer cap, strange shorts, boots, and an upended pink shopping bag, which had been converted into a blouse. She emanated great amiability, stretched out her hand saying she was Jiny Lan.

I took a look at the pictures of the exhibition and was first attracted by one that showed a big hand hovering above a landscape not otherwise specified. Was the hand on the run or did it dominate the events below? Perhaps it would give us a warning?  It was a puzzling, appealing picture which could not easily be interpreted.

It was Jiny Lan’s work. For me this picture was one of the most exciting ones in the exhibition I told her and so we became acquainted to each other.