JinJin Xu: “Against This Earth, She Knocks”
On March 31, 2024, poet and artist JinJin Xu’s solo exhibition Against This Earth, She Knocks opened at HOW Art Museum. During the bustling opening, the crowd followed the artist’s tour, passing through resin-hardened fabrics into a space dominated by a massive flytrap installation. Inside the glowing flytrap, attendees stood or sat, enveloped by the resonating voices. These voices, at times hushed and occasionally transforming into loud proclamations, form a powerful “collective soundscape” that nuances and documents how dislocation affects migrant women workers and their relationship to motherhood.
Before this project, I had the fortune of hosting a forum on the moving image and media with Xu at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai. In our panel discussion, Xu spoke about her experiences traveling to Germany, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Turkey, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Thailand, and South Africa, funded by the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. That year, she lived with hundreds of women experiencing statelessness from forced dislocation. Through translated conversations, letter writing, joint recitations, and sometimes just gazes and smiles outside of the burden of language, Xu collected documentations of their lived experiences, nuancing the “tension” of language within media.
Xu’s approach also embodies the “poetry of witness” that lends itself to genuine expression and mutual observation. It is realized in Against This Earth, She Knocks, which centers the narratives and emotional expressions of women outside the male-dominated social structure, exploring the relationship between observer, documenter, and the documented.
Hanging in the main exhibition hall is the fabric installation As If We Are In Between Sleeping and Waking (2024). The artist collected these fabrics from the temporary shelters and projected onto them fragmented glimpses of video images taken from these homes. The flickering video imagery mimics the camera’s hesitance, as though avoiding the invasion of privacy within these intimate spaces. Yet, when projected onto the hardened fabrics—materials often serving as a physical barrier against the outsider’s gaze—the stuttering images challenge the audience’s expectations. This dynamic creates a dual effect: simultaneously inviting the audience to peer into the sanctity of another’s home while withholding complete exposure, thus resisting the reduction of these women’s lives to mere spectacle. The gentle patterns on the fabrics, combined with this tension, represent acts of escape and defiance.
Rozsika Parker, in her work The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1984), argued that textiles, socially and historically constructed as a female domain, reflect gendered expectations and notions of feminine docility. Here in the exhibition, by solidifying the soft fabric into a hard shell with resin, the artist juxtaposes its literal, physical toughness and resistance with metaphoric softness. Simultaneously, the display offers itself to be touched by the viewers. The audience navigates the contradictory perception of something seemingly soft yet, in reality, hardened—moving around and listening within the artist’s monumental “dreamcatcher.”
“In-betweenness” is a key concept in the exhibition. The audience wanders through the time-spaces and perceptions constructed by the artist using various media, constantly observing, imagining, and resonating. Georg Simmel believed that social interaction between people can only be realized in “space,” and space only gains sociological significance through the process of interaction. Xu deploys Against This Earth, She Knocks as the threshold of “in-betweenness,” thereby returning to the scene, bringing the stories to this point of convergence with the audience through sound, light, and material. It is the existence of “in-betweenness” that allows boundaries to be crossed; it is the connection of “in-betweenness” that enables us to come together.
Entering the third part of the exhibition, five document cabinets encircle the dual-screen video installation Seen Outside Women* Café (II) (2024). The video, primarily a documentary, captures life in a refugee camp at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, a former Nazi airfield. Within it is a “Women*’s café,” a safe space that only allows the entry of migrant women, subverting conventional legal and social hierarchies. The footage shot inside and outside the tent is distinctly different: the former often uses black screens or obscures the women’s specific identities, while the latter clearly reveals the faces and identities of individuals. The contrasting filming techniques, along with the continuous fragmentation of sound, text, translation, and images in the video, showcase how the camera and video, as mediums of recording and expression, achieve a delicate balance between speech and silence, stability and dispersion, protection and confrontation.
Xu often emphasizes the “site-specificity” of her work, which refers not only to her positioning as a poet and artist within the situational space and the recorded locations but also to how her work, through the transmissive nature of the site, articulates itself. This places the audience here and the text there into a new phenomenological relationship.
Xu’s work is both “inter-media” in the Dick Higgins sense, meaning the convergence, blending, and transformation between different mediums, and “transmedia” in the Henry Jenkins sense, utilizing the strengths of various media to present the same story across different platforms. In the five document cabinets next to the video, archives collected by the artist over the past eight years are displayed, ranging from recordings, photo albums, blogs, and diaries to compiled memories and poems. As the audience peruses these archives, they engage in a silent dialogue with the poignant words of people they have never met but which strike deep in the heart—“I [sic] just crying and thinking about what to do next because of the situation,” “I just need a proper life free from scare and the fear,” “Till now. I don’t know what is the future? I’m waiting about this. I’m waiting. But every day is like I lose my strong [sic] to wait more.” These exchanges fill the space between the viewer and the viewed. At this moment of interaction, the dual significance of “in-betweenness” becomes apparent: the movement that originally occurred within the viewed now leaps to the space in-between.
In the final space, dozens of chains of Nüshu (女书) installations made from coal ash are suspended, titled What Would You Hear If You Could? #8: Facing the Earth, We Knock (2024). Nüshu is an ancient and secret script system developed by women in Jiangyong, Hunan. The pictorial characters constitute a unique means of expression, independent from existing and formalized writing systems. Xu chose Nüshu as the material carrier of sound, symbolizing the collective incantation of those who have never ceased to speak across centuries into a multidimensional space.
The installation repeatedly strikes old kitchenware collected from Jiangyong. Even as the characters shatter, the knocking persists. At a certain moment, spotlights illuminate each piece, as if the women stand together in solidarity. He Yanxin (何艳新), who learned Nüshu from her grandmother, once said, “Nüshu is the stars in the sky weeping tears.” At this climactic moment, the exhibition comes to its culmination, interrogating the audience: What is your positionality in relation to these voices?
Victor Burgin wrote in his anthology Between (1986) about placing his work within cultural theory rather than traditional aesthetics, making their precise “location” ambiguous, existing in a state of “in-betweenness”: between galleries and books, visual art and theory, image and narrative, reader and text. Whether it is the light and shadow projected onto the fabric or the intertwining of time-spaces, Xu’s works similarly reside in this sense of “in-betweenness.” Ultimately, the artist’s recording from Cape Town echoes through the exhibition:
“Because we are living in the same world so that we must know each other. If you don’t know each other, there’s wall to each other, each culture, and we must know the [sic] each culture, each religion, and we must have the tolerance to each religion [...]
There is no important [sic] of different religion. It’s nothing. It’s not important. Different culture. The first important thing is human beings.”
Voices are knocking, in between us.