LONDON.- At the end of 2024, Jingjing Xu marked a key stage in her career with Like That, Like That, shown at A5 East in Beijing’s 798 Art District. Curated by Kian from Luan Gallery, the show brought together three moving-image works — House of Unending, Under the Veil, and the in-progress Something Beautiful Dies — creating a visual sequence that explores consciousness, confinement, and the fluidity of time.
Xu doesn’t rely on traditional storytelling in her moving-image works. Instead, it focuses on the presence of the body, both physically and psychologically. Her images move with a gentle rhythm that links emotion and thought. They make viewers notice how they see. Instead of showing the outside world, Xu uses film to look at the way we perceive things. As curator Kian says, “Her images act like a form of thought. Xu doesn’t tell stories; she lets the image become philosophical.”
Xu trained in Fashion Film and Digital Media at the University of the Arts London in 2022. She has never been interested in fashion itself; the discipline served as a tool to study how the body moves, resists, and changes under observation. “The body is the first image,” she has said. “It is seen, shaped, and rewritten continuously.” In this way, her work follows the performative and conceptual traditions of artists like Joan Jonas and Chantal Akerman, using the image as both a site and a tool for thinking.
Her 2024 piece Under the Veil shows this approach clearly. By layering sound and projected images, Xu builds a psychological space where looking becomes a circular act — the viewer watches, but is also watched. The female body stops being a narrative subject and becomes a medium for awareness. The image functions as a living system of perception. Kian notes, “She lets the image look back at itself.” By reshaping gaze and space, Xu positions her work in the field of time-based media, where emotional rhythm, reflexivity, and non-linear structures replace traditional storytelling.
Her ongoing work Something Beautiful Dies extends these ideas into the natural world. Drawing on the Japanese concept of mono no aware, Xu links emotion, nature, and impermanence to form what could be called an ecology of perception. Artificial flowers, a caged peacock, and fragmented reflections are not symbols, but materials that expand the sensory experience. In this work, the image breathes, decays, and regenerates — quietly reflecting loss and persistence. By balancing poetic emotion with formal restraint, Xu achieves a rare mix of affect and conceptual clarity.
Critics often point out that Xu’s importance lies in how she redefines the philosophy of moving images. She moves away from the commodified stories of visual culture and treats the image as perceptual matter — something that thinks rather than simply represents. Her work moves between cinema and contemporary art, asking viewers to think and feel through the images rather than simply watch them.
Since 2022, Xu’s work has been shown in the United Kingdom, Japan, New York, and China, in both art and film contexts. Her practice is not just a mix of disciplines; it is a way to expand awareness — grounded in the body, expressed through images, and realized in time.
As Kian summarizes:
“Her work is a rehearsal of existence — a writing of body, time, and image together. Xu shows that when an image refuses to tell a story, it may come closest to the truth.”
In a time when moving images fill every screen, Jingjing Xu’s work calls for slowness, focus, and attention. She reminds us that the value of moving-image art lies not in movement itself, but in the consciousness that moves within it.
