March 17, 2024

Yifan Jing / Zorg Jing

In this Underline Art Talk, London-based artist Zorg shared Crossing the Window of Faith: Visual Myth, Identity Drift, and the Reconstruction of Community Narratives — a poetic reflection on cultural hybridity, migration, and the politics of visibility. Rooted in his field research across East London, the talk explored how architecture, ornament, and symbolic imagery shape the intersections between faith, identity, and belonging within multicultural communities.

The talk first began with a reference to the short film The Meaning of Names, where individuals reflected on the experience of using non-Western names in Britain. Through this starting point, the discussion unfolded around pronunciation, misidentification, and the poetics of self-introduction — showing how names can carry the weight of identity negotiation. This idea set the tone for the rest of the talk, shaping its exploration of cultural dialogue and visual translation.

In the middle of the talk, the focus shifted to field research across East London — especially in Hackney and Shoreditch. Through images of shopfronts, homes, and places of worship, the talk revealed how layered signs of belief and migration coexist within the city’s visual landscape. The window emerged as the central metaphor — both a boundary and a passage — mediating the gaze between insiders and outsiders, the local and the global, the visible and the unseen. These observations unveiled a living archive of hybrid symbols: Islamic geometric patterns, African hieroglyphs, Christian iconography — each reimagined through everyday decoration and adaptation.

Later in the talk, The Four-Leaf Window — an installation developed from these field studies — was introduced. The work, built in three visual layers, merges European fresco motifs with graffiti textures, reconstructing community symbols into a cross-cultural grammar. Audiences were invited to physically open or close the window, turning observation into participation. During the exhibition opening, two performers dressed in white robes carried flags derived from the installation’s imagery, transforming still images into living gestures — where private memory became public storytelling.

Towards the end of the talk, the discussion turned to Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of “the right to look,” questioning the hierarchy between observer and observed. By granting audiences the agency to move between interior and exterior perspectives, the talk reimagined looking as a shared, reciprocal act — one that embraces vulnerability, subjectivity, and the power to shape one’s own image.

In closing, the talk offered not a conclusion but a visual method — a way of translating faith, ornament, and architecture into a language of empathy and exchange. Crossing the Window of Faith ultimately reimagines the city as a living interface where myths, memories, and materials interweave — reminding us that looking itself can be an ethical and communal gesture.

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