June 30, 2023

Jingjing Xu

In this artist screening, Jingjing presented Coexist (2021), a work shaped by the quiet rupture of arrival. Created during the artist’s first months in the UK amid the pandemic, the piece emerges from a condition of suspended belonging—caught between an unknown exterior world and an unsettled inner terrain.

Through visual layering, mimicry, and repetition, Coexist reflects on how identity is negotiated under conditions of displacement. The artist closely observes others in public space—their gestures, accents, postures, and rhythms—not as acts of simple imitation, but as a method of learning how to exist among unfamiliar social codes. These borrowed forms become a provisional language, a way of testing the borders between self and other.

Rather than framing assimilation as erasure, the work examines it as a fragile performance: a mask worn for survival, a refuge built through reflection. Images, sounds, and textures accumulate as fragments of adaptation, revealing the tension between visibility and alienation, embodiment and self-consciousness. Identity here is neither fixed nor resolved, but continuously rehearsed.

Presented in this screening context, Coexist invites viewers to consider what it means to belong without certainty—to inhabit a space where identity is formed through reflection, negotiation, and vulnerability. In transforming the mirror from a site of comparison into one of recognition, the work proposes coexistence not as harmony, but as an ongoing, unfinished practice.

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