Skip to main content
Moving Image

Jingwen Xu

Education

2019-2021 Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom

MA Contemporary Art Practice: Moving Image

2013-2017 Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, China

BA School of Experimental Art

Jingwen Xu

I like to convey different emotions with my work as the medium. I prefer to combine contradictory feelings, e.g., innocence and sophistication, fun and seriousness, loveliness, and violence. I also like to mix different materials and forms in one work. For example, I tend to mix sculpture, animation, and performance in the same work, because the contrast will intensify the contradiction and I like to express complicated feelings.

The inspiration and inner emotions regarding most of my works originate from my childhood experiences, based on which I make up stories. What I try to recreate is not the events themselves, but the feelings caused by them. I’m interested in all kinds of creatures because they are so different from but inexplicably related to human beings. I like making connections between different things. I like hermaphroditic snails, single-celled paramecium, and the sexy, evil, naive, and lovely rabbits, I’m also fond of imagining virtual space and life, thinking about their possibilities.


RUN RUN RABBIT RUN
[untitled]

I want to express a state of being trapped without knowing it. This might be invisible mind control or purposeful ideological enlightenment. One of the protagonists in my story is a rabbit who lives in a comfortable environment with sunshine, blue sky and tender grass. Enjoying the physical comfort, the rabbit gradually gives up thinking, becomes slow in telling good from evil and truth from lies, and eventually falls into a trap and boundless darkness. Pathetically, the rabbit will not realize it until death. There are two protagonists in the video, namely the rabbit doll with human characteristics and the rabbit played by me as a human being. The rabbit played by me is not a real rabbit, and I’m not a human as well. What I’m playing is more like a brainwashing role above all rabbits. This is an inexplicable feeling which is always so treacherous and unreal just like looking up at the world from the muddy bottom and staring at the face opposite through the flame. This work is lovely and interesting, with a little darkness.


Medium:

Video

Size:

Dual channel video(colour, sound), 03'30", 1920×1080 pixels
LOVE SIGNAL
[untitled]

This work was inspired by my fantasy about my grandmother’s breasts. Such fantasy probably reveals my dependence on motherhood as well as exploration and cognition of gender in my early childhood. At that time, I stubbornly thought that my grandmother’s breasts had got supernatural power to send signals to aliens and connect with them. Therefore, I built a virtual breast planet where there are alien creatures with both female breasts and male genitalia who explore for water and spread their seeds for reproduction. I created the image of these aliens and played one of them myself. This work seems to be relaxing and full of fun with bright colors, but many strange factors can be found beneath the lovely appearance. They are hermaphroditic creatures who are divided into different classes, namely the leaders and the people. Their birth and reproduction are like virus invasion, and they look like mutated creatures.

Medium:

video

Size:

Dual channel video(colour,sound), 03'02", 6720×4480 pixels
BENEATH THE PURE WHITE(Trailer)

Medium:

Video

Size:

Dual channel video(colour, sound), 4096×2160 pixels
Duck's birthday
[untitled]


In this work, I mainly want to express the repression of childhood and the evil of children, which is caused by the suffocating education and school life, and such evil comes from human nature itself. Tadpoles and ducks are the props used in this video. Frog eggs have to become tadpoles before they develop into frogs. In my film, there will be frog eggs with blood, falling tadpoles and tadpoles crushed after being caught, accompanied by the sound of foot trampling and tadpoles’ cracking. In this video, none of the tadpoles manage to grow into frogs in the end. They are eventually trampled, with their bodies exposed to the hot sun, which is bloody and tragic. Nevertheless, the inner struggle and suffering under the highly intense mental pressure is also a kind of invisible bloodiness and tragedy. In ancient China, “鸭” (a Chinese character meaning “duck”) and “甲” (a Chinese character meaning “first rate” or “class A”) were homophones, so “鸭” means to be the Number One Scholar in the imperial examination, which implies a bright future and academic success. In the film, two children kill a duck and then inserted the its head into the mound in the shape of a birthday cake and sang a birthday song for the duck. The scene seems very absurd. It is a memorial ceremony as well as a celebration.




Medium:

Video

Size:

Dual channel video(colour, sound), 4096×2160 pixels