Ruoxi Jin's debut solo exhibition at Mennour navigates fear, separation, and rebirth
Ruoxi Jin, Old shin guard, wooden root, spice ball, fishing baits. 88 x 76 x 72 cm. © Ruoxi Jin. Photo. Archives Mennour. Courtesy the artist and Mennour, Paris.
PARIS.—
Mennour is presenting its first solo exhibition of Ruoxi Jin, whose work transforms the space into a peculiar territory—a spacetime in which found objects full of intimate echoes coexist with one another.
Under the title “Microclimats”, the exhibition is like an inner journey, a narrative whose implicit temporality is that of an airplane flight, from takeoff to landing. This metaphorical trip explores the artist’s relationship to the fragility of existence, conjuring up fear, separation and death. Each artwork acts as a microclimate, being autonomous and yet connected to the others, like so many parallel realities sharing the same present. The exhibition can be understood in this way as a voyage, interspersed with moments of turbulence, calm and suspense that mark the stages of a personal itinerary. The objects become fleeting moments, memories surging up in the wake of a train of thought, like freeze-frames in the continuous flow of time. The apparently simple constructions turn out to be poetic anchor points, memory fragments able to condense an experience that is at once both personal and universal. Together, they make up a heterogeneous constellation, a real topography of emotion and memory.
Éternuement télépathique [Telepathic Sneeze], the airplane’s nose in the centre of the exhibition, is holding back a violent but contained sneeze. In China, sneezing means that someone is thinking of you. It thus becomes a telepathic instrument, capturing the artist’s anxiety and her thoughts. Nearby, Jumeaux [Twins], consisting of an egg and a nesting doll, evokes repair and reincarnation, suggesting that the airplane might have been a bird in a former life.
Some of the objects trace thresholds, signaling an arrival or a departure. The umbrellas Mousson [Monson] and Grêle [Hail], one decorated with little bells, the other with pearls, evoke the sound of rain, hail and the little bells that are attached to the front doors of houses. Their fragile jingling becomes a metaphor for passing time, reminding us that every instant already carries within itself the trace of departure. In Averse [Downpour], this logic continues: the fishing floats hung from the framework of the umbrella are transformed from simple utilitarian objects into vectors of causality, presaging or triggering visible or invisible events. Some of the artworks are steeped in family memory: the gaiter in Le long voyage du membre fantôme [The Long Journey of the Phantom Limb], inspired by the memory of Ruoxi Jin’s grandmother’s wounds, becomes a phantom limb, an image of repair and healing. This gesture of repair echoes the three umbrella frames placed in the space. In Chinese, ‘umbrella’ (saan) sounds the same as ‘separation’. If you open one inside, it brings bad luck, presaging affective or material loss. Here however, these umbrellas act as anti-bad luck agents and reforge ties against separation. Like the gaiter, they transform vulnerability into protection: one caring for a wounded body, the other protecting fragile ties.
The nesting dolls, made in Ruoxi Jin’s native city, are displayed here in their unfinished state, and some have been sliced in two to reveal their interior. Without faces, they lose their identity and become empty shells, moulds, negative spaces holding time. Each doll is both body and envelope, container and void, the threshold of a tangled existence. The same logic is at work in In the warm winter of 2020, scientist Juoxi G. lost his favorite suitcase during a research trip on microclimates. Five years later, a steamer trunk marked with his initials arrived—bearing the same pair of holes on its body. Archaeologists have dated the trunk to the late 19th century. Has the lost case found its way back? - Local Daily News, reported by Rosy J., a travel trunk that the artist found inhabited by wasps. The fragile archive of a transient inhabitation, it testifies to the persistence of life in the interstices.
Several works question artifice and the ways in which symbols are replayed or displaced. Some of them incorporate go stones, scattered across the surface or nestled within, like the traces of a suspended game, positioned as if by chance. This reflection continues with Sans-titre (feu d’artifice) [Untitled (Firework)], a firework made up of nails that throw shadows like rain. From inside the airplane, Ruoxi Jin imagines the scene on another scale: the spectacular becomes intimate, and the ephemeral turns permanent. Issue de secours [Emergency Exit] condenses these logics. A false peach, sanded down to its ‘bone’ is stuck through with a fluorescent clock hand. In Chinese, ‘peach’ and ‘flee’ sound the same. The object becomes at once a symbol of protection and immortality, and a metaphor of escape. At the end of the journey, Tempo primo is the metronome that marks the return to the initial tempo: the imaginary flight has landed and a regular rhythm calls an end to the turbulence, bringing us back to a shared time.
— Marilou Thirache
