The Ordinary Matters—An Exhibition about Reality and Affect

Project Background

The Department of Digital Arts and Creative Industries (DACI) at Lingnan University is pleased to present the exhibition “The Ordinary Matters”, which will take place at Leung Fong Oi Wan Art Gallery, Lingnan University from 10th January to 3rd February, 2024. The exhibition will showcase artist Jing Y. ’s works in collaboration with a diverse array of individuals encountered during her journeys across urban and rural villages in China. Revolving around hidden stories that exist on the fringes of society, the exhibition offers multimedia installations that explore themes of family relationships, work experiences, and personal values from the perspectives of marginalized communities. The artworks have been exhibited in various cities, including Berlin, Guangzhou, and Shanghai, and are now touring Hong Kong.

The exhibition is divided into three sections that demonstrate Jing Y. ‘s artistic path, exploration of realism, collaboration with individuals, and records of socially engaged projects. The first section showcases her early paintings in the style of realism between 2014 and 2016. The second section focuses on her collaboration with female domestic workers in China, and includes drawings, installations, and collective works such as video and photographic work created in the name of several collaborative projects, including “Sweat! Stop! Rewrite!”. The third section highlights recent developments, including an experimental educational space for migrant families established by volunteers and educators Ashu, Jing Y., Ading, and Jack. This exhibition offers a glimpse of various socially engaged projects undertaken since 2019, the impact of which will continue to be explored through offline creative dialogues.

One of the projects featured in the exhibition “Sweat! Stop! Rewrite!” was initiated in 2019. The project intends to reshape female migrant workers’ sense of self and their relationships with the world through creativity by delivering free drawing and writing classes. As part of this project, DACI collaborated with Jing Y. to offer a series of creative workshops to children and adults wishing to expand their horizons through writing projects, reading groups, and critical thinking.

Subjected to neo-liberalism and urbanization, people with migratory backgrounds are often exploited and lack the ability to foster social connections, as well as identify disinformation and misinformation. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, the project aims to inspire and capture the emotional states and expressions of these marginalized groups in response to societal issues related to economics and education. Individuals who have participated in these initiatives believe in the power of creativity to transform one’s life, and hope to influence existing value systems by initiating a more equitable and critical dialogue. By engaging in meaningful conversations and co-creative processes, the project seeks to track the impact of societal setbacks on people and adopt collective learning as a form of empowerment and self-help. The ultimate goal is to cultivate a better educational environment, and gradually make individual and community transformation possible.

The Exhibition

In section 1, Jing Y. ’s oil paintings between 2014 and 2016 in the style of realism are displayed. In this phase, she had just returned to Beijing from her studies at the School of Art Institute of Chicago and was exploring images of plebeians and objects in popular culture as the representation of reality. The gigantic painting The Interpreter (2016) depicts a female dressed as a minority who lies peacefully and does not seem to have autonomy. Her facial expression is quite obscure, as if inhabiting a space between sleeping and speaking. We don’t seem able to penetrate her mental status. How do we read her? This portrait implicitly poses Gayatri Spivak’s question of whether the subaltern speaks for themselves—a question that has inspired Jing Y. ’s later socially engaged projects.

Section 2 showcases various collaborations with working- and middle-class people, including female domestic workers, since 2019. In the collaborative project “Writing‧Mother,” Jing Y. employs co-writing as a process of debating social issues and training participants in critical thinking. While “Sweat! Stop! Rewrite!” is a collaborative visual art project, both aim to encourage affective and critical expressions of reality. In the installation A Mighty Surrender (2021), Mengyu includes slogans mostly put out by a domestic service agency—phrases that also shape how city employers think about domestic service. This collaborative work contains a unique aesthetic as a result of encouraging critical thinking.

The third section includes materials on recent engagement with migrant families and left-behind children. A video installation shows dialogue with little girls about their opinions on beauty as a result of peer pressure and information on the Internet and specifically Tik Tok. The dialogue shows that engaging with discussions of the distinction between reality and perception, and fostering critical thinking.