In speaking of Forms and Certificates, Geng Jianyi said:

“The form used for Forms and Certificates was originally intended for ordinary people. I had already designed it and was struggling with how to proceed when I found a list of participants among the various materials related to the conference. It gave me the idea to mail the form to everyone on the list, get them to fill it out, and send it back.”

“Many people thought the form was issued by the 'China Modern Art Exhibition' organizing committee. Only a few saw through the ruse—like the artists Huang Yong Ping and Wu Shanzhuan, and critic Fei Dawei. Some were cautious. The person in charge of Anhui Artists Association wrote to me, asking me to explain my purpose. […] People were more tolerant then; everyone made time for my project.”

As Zheng Shengtian observed at the time:

“We all filled in the forms. But I didn't think everybody understood what he wanted to do with this. Some people saw this as a joke. At that time, avant-garde to many people was rebel action but not a concept.”

While thinking about the problem of “distance” between art and audience, Geng Jianyi became interested in people’s general awareness of “process,” by which he meant the unfolding of daily life of which every person is a part. He was curious about the degree to which people were aware of how their own actions played a part in what was happening around them. He wanted to see how he could use his concept of “process” as the material for art. He was also curious to see how he might incorporate the effects of people’s actions as they become participants in the artworks, in the way that the effects of seeing and being seen are the core of the Tap Water Factory installation. How, he wondered, could he encourage people to have an effect upon a space, or an artwork, courtesy of their presence?

In 1993, with an artwork he titled Soft Stairs created in Italy, Geng Jianyi draped an unbroken 40-meter-long skein of white silk from the roof to the ground floor of the magnificent stairway of a 300-year-old stone palazzo. The effect was stunning. The visitor’s first reaction was to back up in surprise. Should they walk on the silk-covered steps?

In 1997, Floor continued Geng Jianyi’s attempts to close the distance between art and audience: the new version of the installation specially created for this exhibition is functional; visitors are supposed to walk on it.

Describing the inspiration for Reasonable Relationship, Geng Jianyi said:

“The starting point of this work is the question of looking at a problem from a designated angle, because none of us can look at things from anything other than our own perspective and point of view. We are unable to see from the perspective of others. Of course, we learn through experience; those who have been caned might feel something seeing others receive the same punishment. But for the most part we see only through our own prism on the world. Sometimes to know yourself, you have to borrow a pair of eyes to see clearly. We say that when people discuss problems, they should examine their point of view. There’s also the public perspective. This is where ideas are easily confused and disagreements arise. Generally speaking, people look only at things directly related to themselves, automatically blocking things that are not, and avoiding the wasting of energy. What is most relevant to you? The values you hold alone will determine that.”

Do Yourself the Correct Way and Offset are artworks completed in collaboration with members of the public. In both cases, Geng Jianyi invited ordinary people to re-enact scenes from their daily work or labor, with the result that these two video works explore the subtle shifts in a person’s movement and expression when they are made conscious of being watched or filmed. The process by which the works were produced arose from his interest in awareness of process, together with his curiosity about how people read a scene or image as being real or a fictionalized version, a faked action. What is the difference between the two parallel sequences he presents? Today, we are familiar with taking a selfie, but what about how we perform our “self” for the camera?

Building on Do Yourself the Correct Way, for Offset, Geng Jianyi worked with the staff of a massage spa to re-enact their daily routine. This introduced a new level of complexity to the filming process. To record the natural sequence of the workers in action, cameras were placed at several locations within the spa. Geng Jianyi then scripted the undirected sequence captured by the surveillance cameras as the plot for a re-enactment. The workers are transformed into actors, having learned their lines and the plot sequence to repeat exactly the action of the original recording as if making a film.

In speaking of Offset, Geng Jianyi said:

“Offset might be my favorite work. There were a lot of real limitations in the process of producing it, things that were difficult to control. I put a number of surveillance cameras in the scene where the action was going to happen to capture four main characters, two masseurs and two customers. I also installed cameras in other areas of the massage parlor to record the entry and exit of the characters. After filming, I turned the video recording into a script, and had the four characters re-perform their working activities. This is more advanced than mere repetition: the point now is whether the first sequence is real or the second. Thus, what is real—original—and what is duplicated comes under suspicion.”

In speaking of The Needs of Negative Reality, Geng Jianyi said:

“In 1995, I went to upstate New York, to participate in an artist residency program. There I did The Needs of Negative Reality. It means exactly what the title says. Twenty-six artists were selected from Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. What I did was to hand out a garbage bag and a form, and ask them to throw everything left over from their work into the garbage bag. At the end of the residency, there was an open exhibition at the manor house where the foundation is based. On that open day, I piled up the garbage bags in front of them. Because it happens to be on the spot, careful people can see where the work is located, and there is a live comparison. And there was the form on which everybody wrote the reasons for their choice.”

Geng Jianyi had a natural gift for art that can be seen in the simple yet certain lines and forms of his earliest drawings and paintings, and through his use of color. He began to learning painting formally at the local Cultural Youth Palace in his hometown Zhengzhou in 1979. In 1981, he entered the Oil Painting Department of what was then the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (today the China Academy of Art). As his career developed, his particular strength was an ability to see what was important about a scene, not just what was there. This is clearly demonstrated in the painting that made his first mark on art history, the enigmatic graduation work titled Two People Under a Light, 1985.

Speaking of his early education, Geng Jianyi said:

“Since beginning formal education, I had been trained to search for meaning in an image. Here, the approach was casual; there’s no sense of significance to the arrangement of the figures. I had painted two figures in a [western region] landscape in the manner of a landscape. Two People Under a Light depicted figures like objects in a still-life. I was nervous when I first had this idea, but since I was simply borrowing from another genre, I felt calm. Looking back, I just didn’t like drama. Ideas don’t have to take the form of images; they can be arrangements of strokes, structures and colors. It’s basic language. As long as you have the ability to organize the basics, you can express yourself. Over the years, whether looking at paintings or painting for yourself, I found this exciting. In fact, it does not matter what you draw, what matters is whether the painting has real flavor. Otherwise, it’s like a dish that looks good but doesn’t taste of much.”

Speaking of the early support he received from his professors, Geng Jianyi said:

“Our class was fortunate to be taught by Professor Zheng Shengtian, who had just returned from the U.S. His approach to teaching was different from other teachers. He was good at spotting the students’ skills. He supervised our graduation work. We had never been left to work so freely—we hardly know what to do with such freedom. In discussing our graduation proposals, he didn’t say much about ‘theme’ or ‘content.’ Instead, he asked inspiring questions that followed my own interests. Preparing graduation projects was usually a long process—first a small draft, next an enlarged one, then endless revisions before moving to canvas. The little drawing I first handed in was simple, a few strokes made with a ballpoint pen. To my amazement, Professor Zheng said, ‘No problem. You can go to the big draft!’”

“Professor Zheng placed great trust in his students. When he could, he let us follow our instincts, giving feedback, but mostly letting us decide for ourselves. This filled our entire class with inspiration. In addition to the task of completing our graduation works, we also thought about the issue of display. We each had our own area, which allowed us to include other materials next to the works, including text on our thoughts on art. This was previously unimaginable.”

Describing the work Skim Over, Geng Jianyi said:

“The scroll form is not a common viewing habit today, but it’s a great way of connecting the various threads of an image: as the viewer moves, so they can determine the direction of the narrative. Glimpses of daily life appear faintly through the liquid marks that flow across the surface, producing subjective impressions of the photo-painting. In the darkroom, I exposed photographs in sections on a long roll of photographic paper. I then applied developer fluid using a large brush, so the final work is neither a photograph nor a painting, but can be seen as both photography and painting.”

Speaking of the subject he chose for this unusual series of photoworks, Geng Jianyi said:

“Usually when you think about a bottle, you think about its contents, what it contains. I was thinking about the silhouette, that slope, like a simple wooden doll. For a long time, I have been noticing the shape of bottle mouths (those without a lid or top)... What attracted me was the bottle itself, this transparent, translucent colored glass. I am very interested in glass, in translucent materials. I was using transparency in photography, the idea of looking through, like a lens. I also experimented with water, for example, as well as other transparent materials. With bottles, it was the shape that interested me. Not sure why, but for sure the idea that empty bottles are without the content they were made to contain.”

This group of works was created in 2015 for a solo exhibition at ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai. In this exhibition, ten of the artworks were named Untitled. Confusing for the audience perhaps, but on this occasion Geng Jianyi was focused on the process of expressing the ideas behind the works rather than explaining them through a name or title.

As Geng Jianyi explained:

“An exciting thing pops up in your head, sets your mind on fire, then you can’t sit still. If you don’t get started, if you’re not using your hands, you feel really uncomfortable.”

An important part of Geng Jianyi’s art is the rich and distinctive contribution he made to the genre of artist’s books. From misprinting faces in Reading Matter (1990), to overprinted text elegantly bound in a dark cloth cover in Classics (1992), Geng Jianyi made a multiplicity of experiments using mimeographed printing techniques and hand-painting entire volumes. Some echo instruction manuals (how to walk; how to smile), while others are quite abstract. Another type of intervention sees the artist remove a key word from the text, or remove an entire text with the exception of a single word—as can be seen in the series “How Can a “的” Character Be Enough?”

In 2016, Geng Jianyi was invited to do a project in a paper mill in Japan. In spite of being rather ill, his interest in learning something about new materials led him to spend two weeks in the mill. There, he began using the conventional form of paper—a flat piece upon which an image or pattern or series of marks are made or laid. What caught his interest with the paper pulp was its physical nature, that it could be used to make sculptural forms. Before returning to China, he produced one or two prototypes, leaving the craftsmen to complete the forms. These developed a parallel interest that began in the early 1990s in formats, “squares” as language, and proportions. This was encouraged and expanded through his encounter in Japanese culture to the precisely measured form of tatami mats and the innate coupling of this proportion with a quality of spiritual contemplation.