A Sign Language, the Chinese title of the exhibition is about the handing hand, a part of the body, half suspended in the air by a force. This is in keeping with the state that Xinyi Mei's works present - somewhat ill-timed, suspended and constantly holding the energy of swinging.
Xinyi Mei uses images and texts as a medium of communication. The textual message serves as a specific narrative, embedding the intertextuality of images and the actual representation of symbols in different audio-visual strategies. Using a specific language such as hand limbs, her images amplifying the perceptual system of the senses. The series kuchibiru(lips) is written in miniature novels, imagining unexpected encounters with fictional relationships, and then inviting strangers to collaborate these fleeting moments of intimacy. Each works is a contemporary psychodrama of human relationships, with the slightly awkward gestures and somewhat distorted hands of the characters in the series, lending a sense of tension and uncertainty to each encounters. The approach of staging and scene-setting is applied to Untitled II(Flower meanings and Bees beeping), where Mei wraps the flowers in cling bags, leaving the real flowers in a fragile state of isolation; at the same time, she moves the vases into her room, connecting the seemingly unreal cyberspace with the real space of the self.
Martyr (in exile) consists of a 3×3 lay-out 9 channel slideshow film, with a parallel narrative writing (with subtitle and voice-over as well as a book) presented as an auxiliary. There is a certain fragmentation and contradiction between the image and the text - the television shows a functional image of photographic dailies that create a beautiful advertising scene with their rich colourful content, like a hollow sugar coating, whereas the text is a semi-fictional road novel inspired by a childhood family trip in which Mei meets a woman who is someone’s mistress. The coherent narrative of this intimate and progressively more emotionally charged story of "martyrdom" struggles and eventually dissolves in a fragmented picture.
Xinyi Mei excels at hiding complex and intimate emotions within the text, while the images appear calm or detached. Similarly, Essay Paper uses randomly created images as a tool to try to recollect and record the murmurings in a dream world. The essay is floated above the image, allowing viewers to combine words and images at will as they are viewed from different angles, making the whole series dreamcore-like and experimental.
In the recent work, Writing with willow trees, a meditative experiment combining painting and writing, the distinction between the hanging part of the plant and the root growth explores how the hanging is distinct from the growing in terms of substantiality in a fictional form, and suggests a community of non-duality and dispersion. In another work, ASMR, audiences listen to the guide and feel the body floating or falling in a virtual vertical space, establishing the physical context of the body in the constructed scene.
As most of the world's communication shifts to the virtual space behind the screen, the presence of the body is approaching a flatness and lightness. A Sign Language can be seen as an invitation to the viewer to complete an unfinished narrative in a translucent place of ambiguity and questions, a gambling with gravity, and a reawakening of the body.
Text/Xiao Ruiyun