Artwork Interpretation: the Bars

The Public House

Oil On Canvas

45×38cm

BEI Jiaxiang’s Bar series unfolds like a meticulously staged, cross-temporal one-act play. Using oil on canvas as his stage, he weaves together a century of Shanghai’s splendor with the spirit of Western modernism into a dreamlike visual allegory. This series resists being anchored to any specific era or cultural coordinate; instead, with fluid brushwork, restrained palettes, and ambiguous symbols, it constructs a suspended “memory enclave.” The bar transcends mere physical space to become BEI’s alchemical crucible for deconstructing history and reconstructing the East-West aesthetic dialogue, where ochre, indigo, and orange interpenetrate, collide, and revive within the canvas’s folds.

Throughout the series, BEI’s work displays a striking compression of time and space. He intentionally blurs sartorial markers from the 19th century to the present, using displaced imagery to suggest layers of memory. This evokes Proustian involuntary memory overflow: blurred faces, obscured bodies, overlapping tables and chairs act like fragmented flashbacks within a stream of consciousness. Unlike Degas’s frozen Parisian nightlife in Café Concert, BEI’s temporal layering aligns more closely with the Principle of Three Distances in Eastern art—using shifts in color depth and merging of opacity and transparency to evoke multidimensional temporal depth on a two-dimensional plane.

Kindred Spirits

Oil On Canvas

53×41cm

As Baudelaire observed, “modernity is transition, fleetingness, and contingency; it is half of art, the other half is the eternal and immutable.” It is this latter half that BEI Jiaxiang aspires to. His paint does not freeze a single moment but the eternal resonance of all moments accumulated. The figures’ faces remain indistinct because they are collective apparitions of anonymous souls across time—each one a synchronic presence of every urban spirit who has lifted a glass, whispered, or gazed within the bar’s embrace.