Jinwen Xian | 冼津文

HDMI / CMYK / LBGT

As an artist and designer, Jinwen's work explores the contemporary visual culture and networked-computational aesthetic, who explored mixed media expressions in her work, such as projection mapping, interactive installation, writing and the moving image, trying to approach the goal of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) under the subject matters of image representation, metaphor and fan culture spectacle.

Education:

BA in User Experience Design from UAL, London College of Communication.

MA in Visual Communication from Royal College of Art

Contact

Degree Details

“An event may be small and insignificant in its origin, and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its centre an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently.” BABO is proof of this viewpoint, as well as an example of showing the fullness of a small event. In the BABO, you can see many items which seem to be independent but can be connected to form an irregular grid. We all wandered on this grid.

After watched a reality show last year, I realised that reality is not what it seems. The world is more complex than we thought, and we can no longer distinguish the illusion from reality. Instead of being obsessed with the ‘truth’ of reality, this project reconstructed the image of reality through what it called ‘Baboism’, illustrated by three different bubble-shaped objects (camera lens, Amazon Sphere and air bubble in the ice). What ‘Baboism’ reveals is that we can only see a collection of events as a process of de/reconstruction: narratives are decomposed to simple principles and imaginations, which later are reconstructed as new narratives.

This project started with the fantasy of chasing stars and ended with the sigh of the complexity of the world. This is a broken, incoherent project, and I will not continue to improve it, because I am a half-assed person. When facing a complicated world like this, I can only choose to be relaxed, be selective, and be irreducible.

P.S: This is my WIP project: https://wip2021.rca.ac.uk/students/jinwen-xian

If your work is better than this, you can get a pass.

[On] the Surface — The world of collection is an invisible database, which separated into different small narratives that can be seen by us. When you draw one thing closer to your eye, it may open in its centre an infinite and radiant perspective.

[Under] the Surface — Although the reality is still invisible, small narratives have been boiled down into simple principles by different voices from which new narratives are formed and the distinction between reality and illusion is blurred. Consequently, we can no longer trace the original and deal with every principle that others want us to obey. What we can see is far more chaotic.

Medium: Diagram

Size: 1920 x 1080

Air Bubble is a BABO — Now we salvage an ice cube and listen carefully, there will be cracking sounds when the ice melts. The ice cube is talking to us. Bubbles went through time and space and finally came to us. It’s about being present.

Amazon Spheres is a BABO — On the assembly line of the Amazon warehouse, workers become human robots, assigned tasks by real robots. On the other side, in Amazon Spheres, part of the Amazon’s headquarters, the workspace composed of three spherical greenhouses that not only grows more than 300 species of plants from all over the world. Such a space is called environmentally friendly.

Camera Lens is a BABO — In an era of massive images floating in the air dazzlingly, elites are concentrating power in invisible places. Visibility has no longer any practical meaning, and black box operations have never been more common. In many cases, the closer we get to reality, the harder it is to understand.

Full Publication Preview (English and Chinese):

https://issuu.com/towerofbabo/docs/test

Medium: Publication

Size: 210mm x 210mm

Tower of Babo — A video to distil the content of the publication (Chapter 2) If you don’t have the patience to watch the entire video, I have prepared some screenshots for you.