Following Yun-Fei Ji through the Pratt Institute's Manhattan gallery as he shows me around his exhibition, The Old One Hundred Names, I can feel limestone and lichen crumbling under my fingertips.

Friends of mine—genuine mountaineers, unlike me—have dragged me up more than one sheer rock face for which I was hopelessly unqualified, and Ji's paintings echo the deliberate playfulness, both cruel and wonderful, with which the stone presents itself to the hubris-plagued fool in such situations, allowing just enough crevices and outcroppings to trick him into thinking he knows what he's doing. Here in the gallery, as I curse myself for being dumb enough to think I could even begin to get around Ji's work with a pen, the old false routes up the mountain are presenting themselves again to mock my desperation.

There were other like-minded fools at the exhibition opening a week before with tape recorders and notebooks, but they are gone now—maybe they took an easy path to a false summit and scribbled a few words about how Ji makes classical Chinese landscape paintings with a few postmodern twists, or wised up and turned back like I should have done.

The problem is that encompassing the disparate ends of Ji's paintings, the minute significance-laden details and the enormous scope of the damned things, is a self-contradictory and nearly impossible task. For example, take "A Monk's Retreat" (2002) from The Old One Hundred Names. The eight paintings that make up The Old One Hundred Names follow a fictional village in the Yangzi River Valley from the Great Leap Forward in 1957 to the most recent of China's irrevocable changes, the construction of the mammoth Three Gorges Dam which, by its completion in 2005, will obliterate not only the village Ji has imagined but more than fifteen hundred real villages as well. In Ji's paintings, fragments of the region's history—both personal and public, folkloric and factual—come wriggling to the surface in the face of the coming deluge like earthworms in a thunderstorm.

"A Monk's Retreat" is the climactic fulcrum of the series, and the narrative, as Ji explains it, concerns a monk's hermitage washed away by the rising waters in the Yangzi River Valley as the floodgates of the dam are closed downstream. The message behind the scene seems straightforward enough, as does Ji's painting technique, which appears to draw heavily from the vocabulary of Song Dynasty landscape painting.

Upon closer examination, though, this is all wrong—for one, Ji has structured his painting with far greater density than any Song master would have dared. The careful composition of wind-twisted trees in the foreground is shattered by hasty outlines of wrecked cars and contorted, transparent human figures, some with the faces of Chinese Communist Party officials. The waters of the flood, a grossly unnatural event, are handled with what seems to be an inappropriately natural grace—until, upon closer scrutiny, the waves reveal themselves to be a mass of snarling wild pigs, enormous crustaceans, and semi-human forms that flow into one another as if they were some sort of hairy, scaly, fleshy liquid.

The flood of details and the relentless density of the piece—it seems as if the artist has simply cut an arbitrary segment out of a scroll of infinite length—drown Ji's overarching theme in confusion and ambiguity. The critic Philippe Pirotte probably gets as close as anyone will to explaining the problem; "When confronted with these works," he writes in the exhibition catalogue, "our habitual ways of seeing paintings are tested. The question whether we can ever see what is in a painting before we look at it as a painting is challenged."

Yun-Fei Ji understands this dilemma; after all, he created it. Writing about his work in 2001, he compared his strategy to that of the Heavenly Temple in Beijing. "In order to visit [the temple], one must walk along a mile-long pathway lined with woods. As a traveler moves along the pathway, parts of the temple become visible through the trees—a column, a statue, a doorway—but the whole remains invisible. The pathway is itself an important part of the temple."

That may be true, but certainly not everyone is in good enough shape for the mile-long hike. Perhaps this is why numerous critics—who have never been much for serious exercise, anyway—content themselves with an inaccurate but succinct description of Ji: an artist who draws from the classical Chinese landscape painting tradition in order to call attention to the moral crises of modern China. In a lukewarm New York Times review of Ji's 2001 show at the Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, Roberta Smith wrote, "There's a certain obviousness to these works, both in their combination of Chinese calligraphic and landscape techniques with motifs from Western painting and cartoons, and in their jaundiced worldview."

Yun-Fei Ji, The Next Village, 2002. Courtesy of Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn.

It wouldn't be unfair to characterize Yun-Fei Ji's worldview as rather bleak; his work is largely defined by a keen and ambitious eye for destruction. Ji deals in change with a capital C, nothing less than the wrenching, violent change that has wracked China for the past century and a half. Envision the kind of change that is capable of tearing the millennia-old guts out of an entire nation—the Opium Wars, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution—and then envision those guts spilling across layers of mulberry paper, mixing with the glue and alum that holds the thin sheets together, and you will perhaps begin to get the idea.

But Ji's interpretation of this is far from nihilistic. "Everything is changing so fast," Ji told gallery guests at the U.S. opening of The Old One Hundred Names in March. "[The changes] are good and bad, I think, but I'm more interested in what it's like living through this experience, rather than to say simply that it's good or bad." If there is a recurring reaction in Ji's paintings to the momentous, traumatic shifts they document, it is neither revulsion nor embrace but rather confusion.

In The Old One Hundred Names, the terrifyingly real flood of the Three Gorges is paralleled by a flood of fragmented history and culture in which both are stirred into a torrent of physical forms—flora, fauna, human beings and their inventions—until their meanings have become hopelessly ambiguous. The human characters in Ji's work are perpetually reeling, grasping for bearings both physical and intangible, lost in a deluge that is at once literal and figurative. The destruction wrought by the Three Gorges Dam is so absolute that it seems to be above the simplicity of right and wrong. "To me," Ji says, "with this whole massive project [the Chinese Communist Party] just wants to symbolize destruction. Anything that sustained this culture for thousands of years, all of these indigenous beliefs and cultural heritage; it's just sort of washed away."

"For me, it's not so much about the physical [destruction], but about here," Ji says, pointing to his chest. "I want to look at what's happening here, to the values, to the beliefs, to what's inside. The physical theme is only one dimension." He has written elsewhere that his work "meditates upon the loss of a Ôretreat,'" the sense of repose and sanctuary that was considered the highest value of painting in classical Chinese art criticism, "and laments the place that has risen instead. It is a meditation on the land as the image of our own moral failure."

Yun-Fei Ji's upbringing gave him a front row seat for the demolition derby run by Chinese Communism over the last quarter century. He was born in 1963 in Beijing, and was raised largely on a military base in Hangzhou where his father, who served in the People's Liberation Army, was stationed. He grew up on the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, and as present in his work as the traumatic eras that paved the way for China's entrance into the modern world—the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, Republican China and finally Mao Zedong—is the Chinese Communist Party's betrayal of its own ideals and of the Chinese people.

"I grew up in this feeling of high progress," Ji says. "That was my father's generation; they were about building this amazing utopia through socialism, the most advanced social and political structure on this planet. We would be able to leap economically so fast, to bypass England and America—there was this amazing enthusiasm. But by the time the country opened up, the Cultural Revolution had really shaken everybody; they were so disillusioned."

If Ji's critique of contemporary Chinese culture and politics is complex, his aesthetic palette is equally so. Ji's work may encompass the influences laid out by Smith—he was indeed trained in the classical landscape tradition as well as the Soviet-influenced oil painting that he studied at Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts, and he readily admits the influence of Jan Brueghel and Robert Crumb—but there is considerably more at work here.

Alongside the visual artists he counts as his influences are writers like Joseph Conrad, Cao Xueqin—author of the Qing Dynasty epic The Dream of the Red Chamber, generally considered the high water mark of Chinese fiction—and the Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi, as well as filmmakers like Wim Wenders and the Coen Brothers. But above all, the folk traditions of China, both the visual arts and the folk tales and songs, loom large in Ji's painting, larger than the refined work of the classical masters. "I consider myself more of a folk artist, actually," Ji says. "I just love the folk paper cut-outs, the folk painting, everything."

"When I was an art school student and traveled to the countryside to see art," he explains, "the spirit was so different, you know—[the art] was so free and fascinating. So I always used that as a beginning point. Whenever I go back to that, [my work] is better."

In art that is as politically charged as Ji's, the decision to use folk motifs is a natural one. "Even in old dynastic China," he says, "censorship was very strong—but only censorship of higher level, educated people like poets, because they posed more of a threat." Folk art, however, has generally fallen below the radar of the authorities. "Folk songs are really so wild, all kind of strange things are in them; I always felt more connected with them."

In this respect Ji acknowledges the influence on his work of the eighth century poet Bai Juyi, who was often an outspoken political critic and frequently drew upon folk arts for his raw material. It is telling that Ji would find as much resonance with a poet as with another visual artist; his paintings are marked by a narrative sense that seems to have more in common with classical poetry than with painting, Chinese or Western.

In classical Chinese poetry, patterns travel on several axes: there is the sentence structure of the lines and couplets themselves; the imagery, rhyme schemes, and grammatical parallelism that can run perpendicularly along the length of the poem, weaving the couplets into a cohesive whole; and a third axis of historical and literary allusion. Ji's work often operates on a similar framework, as in the case of The Old One Hundred Names' "Wedding Ballad" (2002). "[The title] is referring to folk singing," Ji says, "but I'm doing it visually, so I'm using a lot of Chinese folk patterns."

The painting, built out of vivid red hues and the stylistic rudiments of folk art, reads as a story running left to right along the scroll, an account of a wedding in Ji's fictional village. If this narrative comprises the lyrics of the "Wedding Ballad," the colors over which it is superimposed are its melodic and rhythmic structure, progressing with an almost musical momentum across the paper.

Finally, there is the third layer of allusion—an accordionist at the wedding party refers to the 1950s taste in China for Eastern European music, while a woman with an intricately painted face recalls far older traditions in local folk theater. One figure's blue suit is that of a CCP official, another's garments are faithfully reproduced from folk patterns collected by Ji while researching The Old One Hundred Names in the villages of the Three Gorges region.

These and other allusions point to vastly disparate eras in Chinese history, eras that are recalled in "Wedding Ballad" without concern for their temporal separation. Even on the more brief time scale of the characters themselves, such divisions are elastic; a dead grandmother returns to join the wedding celebration, and a final scene tacked on the far right of the painting, depicting a figure lying in bed, questions whether or not anything to the right of her occurred in real time, or rather in a dream.

All of this makes "Wedding Ballad" a linear narrative lacking a solid frame of reference on any time scale, historical or personal, beyond the immediate moment of the celebration itself. On the eve of the flood of the Yangzi River Valley, thousands of years of history have been compressed into a single instant that is somehow a physical space, a village where all of these years have gathered to see themselves erased by the rising water.

But even as it eulogizes the doomed village, "Wedding Ballad" stands for something more universally human. "In [this] celebration painting, there's a tragic feeling to the moment," Ji said at the show's opening. "In life in general, the happy moment is so important, so rich—that's why it's so important to capture that moment, because you know [it's] going to disappear."

This concern for disappearance extends to Ji's technique as well, a painstaking process of staining and erasing, of creating whole scenes and washing them away, sometimes over the course of years. What appears at first to be a faint discoloration might, upon closer examination, contain an entire folk tale, political satire, or chapter of history.

With continued attention, these knots of images start to unravel and the painting begins to open. "A lot of the time the Western approach is to try to grab your attention right away and deliver very fast," Ji says. "But I'm more interested in the gradual delivery of what I want to say, that kind of gradual unfolding. Not to deliver all of it, but to deliver part of it—maybe that's more effective." The result, for the patient viewer, joins to the forward movement of Ji's narrative a captivating outward motion. From a vantage point in front of one of the paintings, this opening seems alternately like that of a flower and that of a bear trap. In fact, Ji's work is somewhere in between the two, like a carnivorous plant or a spider's web—a disarmingly delicate chaos rendered in minute, fragile details gives a seductive sheen to paintings that are, in their opaque interiors, full of brutal and dangerous things.

One of the last paintings in The Old One Hundred Names cycle is "Ritual Cleansing" (2002). It is also one of the most straightforward. "Ritual Cleansing" is built around a folk tale in which a devout Buddhist woman comes to live in the garden of a powerful general, who is planning a coup against the government. The general becomes fascinated with her appearance, which flickers between that of a fragile old woman and a beautiful young girl, and one day he spies on her in the garden, only to find the woman—her face aged and the color of ashes—methodically slitting open her stomach and removing her entrails. He watches as she calmly washes them and places them back in her body, and within minutes she has regained the complexion of her youthful incarnation. The general, although he has seen plenty of bloodshed in his lifetime, is so disturbed and moved by the blood of the Buddhist woman that he abandons his plans for the coup.

"Ritual Cleansing" depicts the woman's washing ritual in graphic detail. Set in a lush garden built from the decorative lotus patterns of Buddhist murals and other floral motifs not often used in Ji's work, the painting has a matter-of-factly meditative quality to it in which the profoundly peaceful and the deeply disturbing coexist. It has the feeling of a body of water that has been polluted to the point of absolute stillness and clarity found only in the absence of life—a dead lake.

In fact, the tale behind "Ritual Cleansing" may be the best way to understand Yun-Fei Ji and his work. With their convoluted layers of imagery, his paintings are an aggregate of recent Chinese experience, but they are also something more personal than that. Everything in The Old One Hundred Names has been filtered through Ji's own life, delivered in the surreal rush of memory, and the guts of China he has spilled out are equally his own—the way in which Ji washes his paintings may be as much a metaphor or a folk tale itself as it is a technique. With luck, a sympathetic general will find him soon.