PUBLIC OPENING: 3 JUNE 2022, 16-19H
LOCATION: SINARTS GALLERY (GOOGLE MAPS)
This June, SinArts Gallery welcomes Jessie Yingying Gong and her playful artworks to the gallery in The Hague. We are excited to present Light Strokes, a project referencing Jessie’s play with light, language, and calligraphy.
Born and raised in China before setting out to Europe, Jessie has always been fascinated with subjects concerning memory, identity, symbols, and language. By using a wide variety of mediums, including photography, textile, installation, performance, and coding, Jessie weaves those themes through her work in ways that interconnect, but also challenge boundaries.
Our exhibition Light Strokes features a cross-section of Jessie’s works. In New Semiotics, contrasts and similarities of our linguistic histories are brought to life with colorful and lively neon signs representing ancient symbolic characters from Europe and Asia. In Dance Remains, she visualizes body language through long exposure photography, demonstrating the connection between motion and light. Originating from her tai-chi practice, Jessie creates calligraphy of movement using those “light strokes”, revealing the traces of gestures in space.
Especially for this show, Jessie has brought to life her most recent project Lust for Words, encoding the compressed writing of shorthand. Together with her previous work Nüshu Tapestry, they both look at the hidden layers of our linguistic history, through the tactile process of tufting and embroidery.
It becomes apparent that language and writing are systems through which we discover and identify ourselves, both as individuals and collectively as a society. For the audience, the works can reveal much to us about how memory, meaning, and identity are connected. The show will be on view at the gallery until 15th July.
Works
BIO
Having been born and raised in China before setting out to study and live in Europe; prompted in Jessie a lasting fascination with the topics of memory, identity, symbols and language. She is currently developing a series of works regarding the form, materialization and development of language. The research into these aspects of language, with a focus on the written forms, leads her to a kind of archaeology of symbolism, that serves to chronicle our history on a multitude of levels.
Jessie studied in London College of Communication and Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. She has completed several artist residencies, and been awarded Young Talent and Artist Project contributions from Mondriaan Fonds. She actively participates in international exhibitions; her work has been to Venice Biennale, Beijing Photo Biennale, MAXXI, Art Rotterdam, W139, etc. Jessie is based in Amsterdam and Shanghai.