We were lucky to catch up with Nianrui Jiang recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Nianrui, thanks for joining us today. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?
I can say that the upper limit of my artistic achievement was given to me by my mother. I can learn technology from a million places and art theory from the infinite Internet, but the talent and perception that determine an artist’s ceiling cannot be learned.
My mother is an artist and painted all the time. But she didn’t plan for me when I was a child that I would need to draw in the future, nor did she take the initiative to teach me to draw, and until I was three or four years old I had already started to draw a lot of pictures on my own by learning to hold a brush like she did (and I still have them, with my parents’ comments from that time), and she still didn’t rush to teach me about it. All she did was to take me around, give me enough time to be in touch with nature, and never interrupt me while I was watching bugs, teasing the cat, playing in the water, or picking up leaves. After I grew up with strong painting techniques and theories, I truly believe that the internal factors that help me create the best works are my sensitive and attentive approach to life, and most importantly, my ability to capture happiness in every ordinary moment.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I come from Chengdu, China, with 25 years of experience in traditional painting and calligraphy, and have experience working with auction houses, private collectors and private magazines. Overall my artistic background is in oriental art, which is more serious compared to popular art-Chinese traditional art and calligraphy is a very rigorous system that is concerned with genres, brushwork, inheritance, and the subtle details of line. And I am obsessed with the inner logic and connection between world art history and art theory. I will regard the whole art history as a living organism, imagine and study how it is born, how it develops, how it grows, how it transforms, and how it is reborn.
However, I am a very non-serious person, very relaxed and free, and even funny, for example, I especially like ugly photos, the more I like people, the more I like to paint ugly portraits of them. All of the above makes me an integrated organism of rigor and fun. On the one hand, I advocate strict theory and technique, on the other hand, I am obsessed with triggering the beautiful highlights of daily life in a relaxed and funny way, that is to say, I potentially have the standards of classicism, but I am happy to express daily art with the openness of contemporary art, which I would like to call a modern dance without losing the root of the art.
Regarding my current situation, I have not achieved social visibility at the moment, but after I graduate I will make efforts and plans for this in a lucrative capacity, and I would very much like the world to see me and know me. What I have already achieved, apart from winning various awards and getting the first place in China for my other master’s degree, is that I can remain free and happy to create each series of works, and there is no dry period of inspiration, my sensitivity to life makes my ideas explode at any time, and I always have a way to take them on with my old skills or new tools, and produce my own satisfactory works. I think this achievement can be said to be very big, because maybe this kind of mentality is the pursuit of many people in their whole life after they become famous, or it can be said to be very small, because it is very easy for me.
I hope the world can see how I, as an oriental artist, use my own slightly old-school style to express new attitudes and thinkers, and I hope people of all races can join me in teasing the world. My current representative work is my cat Yeyi, a tuxedo cat that was once a stray cat in Beijing, which I adopted six years ago. I have been living with cats since I was a child, and I am very familiar with the physical structure and emotions of cats. In addition, Yeyi is a very intelligent and expressive cat, and he interacts with me very much, so I have created many illustrations and picture books based on him, and also many cute little products such as pop socket, air freshener, sticker, postcard, friends feel very comfortable using them in their lives. So, as a traditional Chinese painter, I prefer the world to see my popular art works and products rather than my fine art works, because it can resonate with all the people on earth who are obsessed with cute things, and at the same time, even when I do this, I never lose my personal style with traditional taste.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
My most basic value and principle is to be peaceful and happy. As an ordinary person, earning money should be for the abundance and happiness, being with family should be for the happiness and belonging, falling in love with someone should be for romance and joy; and as an artist, creating art should be for the pleasure too. Of course I think that a threshold before pleasure is an excellent and well-developed aesthetic system, and a familiarity with art history and art theory – which can be regarded as ‘principles’, and ‘values ‘ are what nourish the soul. It is worth mentioning that the pleasure of nourishing the soul does not refer to excitement and joy in particular, there are some pains brought about by historical reasons or personal experiences that can make the art of a certain period or a certain person, but this art must be a soft hand that soothes the soul born from the darkness.
That’s why I think one of the most rewarding things an artist can bring to the table is spiritual resonance. The resonance may be a moment in life that occurs every day, a philosophical realization, a politically charged position, a cross-generational attitude, or an emotional expression between people. It is for this reason that there are such ‘non-traditional’ arts as Dadaism, conceptual art, and performance art. Because art is always oriented to human feelings, if it loses the connection with emotions, then it is a work that can’t be defined, even if it is a purely commercial painting, behind the desire to pry up the transaction is also the resonance between people in the society and it, just that the commercial work lies in hitting the desire to consume, and fine art lies in the expression, only that the two are sometimes confused intentionally or unintentionally, which is harmless, to some extent.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
I got my first followers on social media platforms because I drew my own and three of my friends’ cats and posted it on ‘Xiao Hong Shu’ platform, and just for fun I assigned each of them what I thought would be appropriate MBTI personalities, and captioned it ‘Please provide me with the heads of your own cats to play with’. About two hours later three or four unknown internet users posted pictures of their own cats in my comments , and after I drew one or two of them, the post began to skyrocket in traffic, reaching 50,000 views within 30 hours, with comments and likes quickly reaching over 2,000, and followers increasing by about 1,500 in a short period of time. I became obsessed with scouring the comments section for cats with various patterns and highly distinctive expressions, and drew over a dozen cat heads in a week. Honestly, I didn’t start out with a detailed plan to draw a set of 16 cat MBTI personalities, but rather I made this decision to make them a series when I got to 16. So I paired up the cat heads and personalities and designed each cat’s movements based on my personal understanding and knowledge of the 16 personalities.
What made me very, very happy and satisfied was that the series got very good feedback from web traffic, and what was even more interesting was that countless of my close friends and followers on the internet told me that the cats that corresponded to their own MBTIs happened to be very close to the cats that they had in real life, and sent me photos to show me, which I thought was one of the funniest things in the world. After that, something even funnier happened, and that was when I turned the series into little products, such as pop sockets, air fresheners, post card sets, and stickers, and when the cat owners received their corresponding items and sent me pictures of their cats with my products, I felt like my mind was in the shape of a happy brainwave. In addition, this March coincided with the MOCCA Art Market in New York, and I brought my products to the booth with MICA illustration students. My products sold better than I expected, and several followers who knew me from my cat head works came to our booth to meet me and support me. It was a connection between art and the masses that I had never felt before as a painter who grew up painting traditional paintings, like a kind of spiritual massage.
The source of everything I’ve said above is because I drew three cat heads out of interest, and that source surprised me like a bullet that hit the center of the bullseye, sending ripples after ripples. So, for those who don’t have followers and social media influence at this moment, keep the real passion, draw what really interests you, stick to posting it, and sooner or later you’ll have the most popular piece of work relative to yourself – why so generalized and without a specific methodology, because you can’t catch traffic spikes or get traffic codes by guessing and analyzing, and your popular posts are often not carefully planned.
Like on my IG account, the most popular works were two posts about my children book ‘CAT!’, not the MBTI series. And that children book gets very little traffic on Xiao Hong Shu. So, I say be genuine about your interests, have fun with yourself, keep fun drawing, and you’re bound to have an audience that resonates with you.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.januaryillustration.com
- Instagram: januaryy687
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/january-jiang-706650308
- Other: Email: [email protected]
Xiao Hong Shu: JANUARYY
Wechat: 449597999
Image Credits
all illustrated/painted by January Jiang