A Mood of Relations
“I don't know what I'm trying to express. Sometimes I simply know a photograph must be taken.”
This is perhaps the sentence Xin Jin repeats most often whenever one asks about her photographs or the motivations behind her practice. The second is equally straightforward: “I just find it interesting.” Yet is it really that simple?
The British psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott famously asserted that “there is no such thing as a baby.” What appears before us is never an autonomous individual, but a subject already embedded within a web of familial, social, and environmental relations. In this sense, Winnicott’s proposition offers a productive lens through which to approach the experiential narratives that have become central to contemporary artistic practice. Creative impulses do not arise in isolation; they emerge from lived experience and remain inseparable from the relational structures through which subjectivity is formed. Xin Jin is no exception.
What distinguishes Xin Jin’s work is the way the photographic image functions as an interface between the construction of situations and the experience of being. Rooted in embodied cognition, her images do not offer emotion as representation; rather, they open a space in which affect may be sensed through absence, fragmentation, and what is deliberately withheld. Such strategies define a particular mode of engaging with the external world—one that is as much an act of observation as it is of reflection.
Equally crucial is the distance that remains outside the frame. Emerging from lived experience, it forms a liminal space between interiority and exteriority, self and world—a threshold from which the artist negotiates her relationship to both.
Xin Jin’s artistic language is deeply informed by the conditions that shaped her early life: institutionalized education, the collective social environment of the danwei compound, and the embodied vulnerabilities of chronic childhood illness. Together, these experiences have profoundly influenced both her perception of the world and the formation of her artistic methodology.
Within her photographs, fragility and contingency coexist with hesitation and loss of control, while moments of apparent stillness often reveal underlying forms of absurdity and disorder. The “scene-building games” that occupied her childhood would later develop into a photographic strategy of constructing situations and narratives, giving rise to a fragmented and non-linear visual language. Meanwhile, experiences of generational discontinuity within familial structures continue to shape her ambivalence toward relational certainty, as well as the distance from which she engages with the world around her.
It is from this perspective that photography, for Xin Jin, is neither a means of recording nor an act of capture. Rather, it unfolds in the space between construction before the image and presence after it. The photographs that connect this practice are not simply fragments through which ideas are articulated; they are also sites where existence momentarily declares itself.
In this sense, A Mood of Relations is not an exhibition about relationships per se. Instead, it considers how relations function as underlying structures that permeate individual experience and participate in the ongoing production of subjectivity. What is at stake here is not the representation of relations, but the ways in which relationality quietly shapes perception, organizes experience, and conditions the emergence of the self.
Taking the artist’s act of looking as its point of departure, the exhibition unfolds through four chapters that trace the development of her artistic methodology while simultaneously mapping the formation of her experiential world.
The "Familiar Objects" begins with a constellation of fragmented images, focusing on everyday things that are unconsciously selected, repeatedly encountered, and persistently contemplated. These objects function not merely as material presences, but as vessels through which memory, attachment, and projection take shape.
"The Theatre of Existence" situates these fragments within broader circumstances, shifting attention from object to environment, from image to situation. Through this transition, the work interrogates established narratives, social orders, and conditions of being. Here, absurdity is not employed as a dramatic device; rather, it emerges as a structural condition of everyday existence itself.
"The Dynamics of Relations" turns toward the internal mechanics of relationality. Whether manifested through kinship, social structures, or interactions between individuals and their environments, subjectivity is continually negotiated through processes of tension, balance, and contestation. The symbolic gestures embedded within these images point simultaneously toward structural constraints and the artist’s subtle resistance to established orders.
The final chapter, "Liminal Space", brings the exhibition beyond experiential narrative and toward a threshold of subjective awareness. Rather than offering closure, it suspends meaning within a state of openness and indeterminacy. Here, the work shifts from the tangible to the affective, from representation to perception, and from external reality to psychological possibility. In a gesture reminiscent of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s notion of the open ending in postdramatic theatre, interpretation remains unresolved, leaving the viewer to inhabit the space between experience and meaning.
The title "A Mood of Relations" takes inspiration from the linguistic resonance of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, borrowing not its narrative of intimacy, but its atmosphere of indeterminacy. The exhibition is not concerned with relationships as sites of romance, fragility, entanglement, or emotional ambiguity. Instead, it considers relations as a persistent condition of perception—a state suspended between certainty and uncertainty, consciousness and unconsciousness, affirmation and doubt, rupture and self-preservation.
Understood in this way, relations are neither visible nor fixed; they exist as latent forces that shape how one encounters the world and, ultimately, how one comes to understand oneself. They form the ground upon which the artist’s engagement with the external world becomes possible, while simultaneously opening a space in which viewers may locate echoes of their own experiences. The subtlety implied in the title thus resides not in the relationship itself, but in the shifting thresholds through which self, world, and meaning continuously come into relation.
