Arch Gallery (Shanghai) is pleased to present the solo exhibition of artist Xue Ying, titled "The world managed to teach us how to sing our song". Xue Ying consistently gazes toward the truths of life. In her latest project "The World Taught Us How to Sing," reality once again becomes the source of creative power. This conviction also shapes her approach to acquiring knowledge and inspiration—it must be sought from within the world itself, just as when the world teaches us how to sing, we are inevitably situated within it, amidst its sunlight and routines, shadows and peculiarities.
Xue Ying’s practice might recall what anthropologist Tim Ingold terms the “art of inquiry”—an art that demands the flow of thought to synchronize with the materials it employs, ultimately achieving a “correspondence” between maker and material. In this project, the artist explores bodily and mental experiences where the external and the internal, the mundane and the perilous, occur simultaneously. This is conveyed through unique ceramics crafted from her study of pottery techniques, and stockings coated with silicone, stretched to absurd lengths, and finally anchored to the ground with sharp iron spikes. Through the manual weaving together of split and flattened tires with strands of hair, she reveals how resilience, docility, and wildness encounter one another—interdependent yet mutually alienated. Meanwhile, the bizarre objects assembled from hand-polished iron plates and spikes hang perfectly in the liminal zone between material and tool, uselessness and utility. When the plate faces upward, it could almost serve as a table—though a surface balanced on spikes is clearly precarious. Flipped over, one might obtain a cage or even an instrument of torture, yet since we already possess a civilization that claims to renounce violence, such a purpose naturally falls outside legitimate consideration.
Typically, Xue Ying thinks through making—not the other way around—and what guides the making is touch. “It was through tactile-inspired engagement with materials—understanding their softness, hardness, coldness, dampness, malleability, fragility, and resilience—that the logic of the entire project gradually clarified. For instance, grinding spikes on a large polishing machine was also an experience where physical force coexisted with an awareness of danger, even direct encounters with it. There were moments of holding them in hand, repeatedly stroking to confirm their sharpness, and moments of being cut and scratched multiple times.” Precisely because of this, the final piece, “Church, Home, Sweet Love,” can be regarded as the of the project, or an essential “MacGuffin”—a device that belongs nowhere yet provides real motivation for the characters within the field. So what do these characters pursue? Or, since modern civilization can already offer almost everything, including its own version of reality, why must characters enter a field that remains clumsily and frustratingly unfolding, ultimately able only to approach but never fully arrive at truth? Perhaps the answer is that even if destined to become characters, they still possess the desire to be themselves, and what they must pursue can only be their own version of reality. The modern individual, hastily declaring themselves postmodern, conjures fears of falling into some “backrooms,” yet this project’s field lays bare threats of violence and their true agents before their eyes. In the artist’s own words: “Violence and danger in everyday life are everywhere. I can see in myself how violence becomes internalized as part of my being, and I can see in other women the same composure and familiarity in the face of danger and violence—just as a woman’s life is accompanied by bleeding. Perhaps what makes you tremble with unease is precisely the everyday life we experience.”
What enables the artist to touch upon all this remains the experience of being a woman, which she has always trusted. Under patriarchy, if a woman refuses to alienate or instrumentalize herself, she can only exist in a state of. This distance ensures she can both perceive the pervasive pressure of reality and imagine that truth still holds multiple possibilities. Like Sylvia Plath trapped under a bell jar yet still able to extend a pen—writing the essence of this nightmare to win time outside of eternity—the artist, too, uses her own hands to ensure she remains present. Faced with violence that teeters and threatens both others and herself, confronted with the of everyday heterogeneity, the woman artist has no intention of, because she can learn more from the potential of disorder. Marina Abramović’s roar from years ago—“Art must be beautiful”—a performance the artist herself greatly admires—still lingers in people’s minds. Beauty is often reduced to a kind of order, but when the artist has no intention of intervening in order through action, her action can become synonymous with knowledge, inspiration, and beauty. Through the “inner knowledge” she reveals, people, too, may reach the various possibilities of truth that she has glimpsed and preserved.
Besides, the artist has her most reliable allies—those materials that originally existed in nature but have now been incorporated into human daily life and the march of reality. And when she uses her own hands to liberate them from the cage of “utility,” granting them intentions that serve no order, they stand firmly by her side. Corresponding with materials means the artist has a chance to escape the endless cycle of modern civilization’s “disenchantment” and “re-enchantment”—and perhaps this is the only hope for humanity to return to a true life.
