Artist：Qin Jin

Exhibition: Honeysuckle says: The Mother will provide

Duration：March 14 - April 26, 2026

Opening：4:00 PM, March 14 - April 26, 2026

Live Streaming: Saturday, March 14, 2026, 10:00 am

From Can I Stay With You a While Longer? (2003)—in which Qin Jin burned her mother's belongings—to the Modified Landscape series (2022), with its cloud-like forms, Qin Jin's practice has consistently explored a single question: how one learns, in the space between loss and gain, to endure, to transform, and ultimately to dissolve the question itself. Her works resemble honeysuckle vines, winding through memory and forgetting, violence and tenderness, sacrifice and rebirth. In her hands, these seeming opposites ultimately blossom on the same stem.

In 2003, shortly after graduating from the Oil Painting Department of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, Qin Jin undertook an act that appeared strikingly radical at the time: she set fire to the wardrobe and garments her mother had left behind. Her mother had passed away during Qin Jin’s childhood, and this early loss became a fissure that runs through her life. In Can I Stay With You a While Longer? , the moment when flames consume the wooden cabinet and clothing is both an act of destruction and a gesture of mourning. As the critic Karen Smith writes, “Fire assumes the role of a ‘medium.’ It is not a gentle presence of this world; by consuming worldly things and turning them into ash and smoke from the other side, it becomes an agent of sacrifice and transcendence.” Qin Jin imbues fire with meanings of purification and renewal—to burn is to release the dead, and to allow the living to move forward.

Works from the same period, including Black Comb (2006) and I’m Cold (2006), continue this paradox of preservation through destruction. The objects she chose are intimate ones—combs and garments—everyday items that once touched the skin and retained the warmth of the body. Fire became the only language through which she could address her mother, and it also emerged as the earliest language of her artistic practice: resolute, incandescent, and absolute.

If the fire in her early works was an explosive confession, then the work she began in 2006, Twenty-nine Years, Eight Months, Nine Days, transforms that confession into a daily, gradual immersion. The piece took three years to complete: Qin Jin sat in a dimly lit room and pressed and ironed clothes day after day, until the silk dehydrated and carbonized under high heat, fragile to the touch. The camera captured beads of sweat tracing the strands of her hair; it captured garments as they transformed, piece by piece, into something ghostly, a presence. What might appear a seemingly domestic chore was, in her hands, elevated to something approaching religious ritual—ironing here no longer served to smooth, but to bring about death. Karen Smith keenly observed: “The artist brings objects to the brink of total destruction, yet exerts control, rescuing them from annihilation. This artist—Qin Jin—is a high priest ruling a domain.”

This paradox of "control" became a key thread in Qin Jin's subsequent work. In her 2015 solo exhibition Bones that comply，Flesh that Yields, she explored this tension to its furthest expression: across 125 square meters of wall, she repeatedly rubbed pastel-colored plaster pelvis models against the surface, tracing the bowed figures of the peasant couple in Millet's The Angelus. Tens of thousands of rubbings gradually wore down the hard plaster, yielding a soft red powder—a corporeal expenditure and a spiritual offering. In the face of overt power and rigid social norms, Qin Jin chose a form of private resistance: outwardly compliant, while inwardly inscribing a silent, unmistakable "no."

Completed in 2014, the three-channel video When I Am Dead represents a watershed in Qin Jin’s practice. Taking nearly three years to complete, the work explores three distinct stages of life, telling a story of cyclical return and reconciliation. Foam appears throughout the piece: it is both the froth of waves breaking on the shore and the fleeting bubbles and stains left between bed sheets; it is also the mottling on aged skin and the supple, translucent flesh of a young girl. In a tempo reminiscent of silent film, Qin Jin captures aging and renewal, memory and forgetting, parting and reunion. The writing of the elderly, the gaze of the middle-aged, and the vitality of the child—presented across three parallel screens—form a temporal montage. They are the same person: simultaneously mother and daughter. As Qin Jin herself has said, “For those who believe, sacrifice is real.” When the role of mother entered her own life—when she herself became a mother—she was finally able to face that long-ago departure with calm. When I Am Dead is no longer an elegy, but an acceptance: acceptance that life, like foam, is fleeting yet complete; acceptance that loss, like the waves, departs only to return.

After 2016, Qin Jin’s attention shifted from “water” to “clouds.” In her Modified Landscape series, the rolling forms of clouds conceal the silhouettes of armed figures and carry intimate, private symbols—knees, ribbons, and school uniforms. This form of concealment is not an act of timidity, but a manifestation of mature insight. In one conversation, Qin Jin remarked: “A hero might be a victim, or might not. Sacrifice depends on context—it is complex.” She no longer burns with flame directly; instead, she transforms heavy memories and historical admonitions into landscapes as light and ephemeral as clouds. The “Euro-chic” frames popular since the 1990s, the stylized lettering on wall posters, and the motifs on badges—these visual experiences from her upbringing—are retrieved and recombined into a visual grammar of self-enlightenment.

Works from the same period—Old Tales Retold, Activity Exercise, and the Enigma series—continue this personal rewriting of collective memory. She abstracts movements from broadcast calisthenics, rendering them as kneeling, nodding, or performing the far-right salute; she juxtaposes the vastness of the cosmos with the everydayness of school uniforms; she places representations of “sacrificial” heroes alongside mundane agricultural knowledge. Huang Jingyuan has described this approach as a form of “stratigraphic analysis”: “to examine one’s own spiritual history—how the political within the self has been extracted, labeled, and evaded, and then how it might re-emerge as a politicality distinct from public discourse.”

Beyond her visual practice, Qin Jin has maintained a discreet parallel thread: writing. From Mini (2006) to Evening Glow and Why Looking for Realty (2016), and then to The Invisible (2018), she has turned to fiction to address what images alone cannot convey. She is drawn to language's capacity to "objectify one's own existence," and to the peculiar charm of fabrication—"making the fake sound as real as the truth." Qin Jin reflects: "Writing fiction isn't easy for me, but it's an exercise—there's a real pleasure in the process of structuring, like taking a pile of scattered blocks and eventually building a house I've never seen before."

In Invisible Man, she begins with a question posed by an “otaku” to herself: “Why do I want to become invisible?” To escape the gaze of others and evade the will to be objectified—while remaining open to someone “who cannot be seen with the naked eye.” That someone might be a mother, might be God, or might simply be another version of herself. The butterfly pattern that appears in the story—“a marking meant to intimidate others, convincingly real yet ultimately artificial”—serves as a metaphor for how she approaches all narratives: the territory of fiction lies precisely between the real and the imagined.

This trust in—and simultaneous vigilance toward—language is inseparable from her reading experience. Kafka, Tucson, and Calvino opened for her the possibilities of formal experimentation. She learned to “shatter” stories and to allow text and image to maintain distance while mutually nourishing one another. In her practice, writing and painting run in parallel: they belong to the same author, yet each operates independently. As she has said, “This is my favorite aspect.”

In 2026, honeysuckle becomes a key to understanding Qin Jin—not only because it signifies endurance, but also because it embodies transformation. Honeysuckle blossoms white at first, then turns golden, two colors on a single stem—much like the paradoxes that run through Qin Jin’s work: fire as both destruction and ritual offering; ironing as both smoothing and dismantling; clouds as both lightness and weight; a blue that is not red, yet quietly contains the character for “sin.” Rather than choosing between opposites, she allows them to coexist, intertwine, and ultimately transform into new forms of life. Yet Qin Jin has never attempted to position herself as a “neutral” artist. She openly embraces the gifts and burdens brought by her own gendered experience: the early loss of her mother, the experience of becoming a mother herself, the everyday life of being a daughter and a wife, and the body and desires of being a woman. These experiences have never been filtered out of her work; instead, they have become its most vital source of energy.

In the spring of 2026, standing within the exhibition Honeysuckle says：The Mother will provide, we encounter the traces of more than two decades of shadows—a complete narrative of self-redemption wrought through Qin Jin’s art. From burning fire, to the sweat of ironing, to sea foam, to clouds in the sky—her creative trajectory resembles the twining vine of honeysuckle: winding through the chill of death, and at last coming into bloom, gold and silver on a single stem.

“My creative process begins with personal memory—at the moment when I become consciously receptive to influences from the outside world,” Qin Jin reflects. “I have always been committed to seeking the subtle differences within things, trying to capture the traces they leave behind. I see myself as a detective in search of ‘evidence,’ revealing the impulses that drive my artistic practice and giving myself a reason to continue—whether in life or in art.”

Today, these “pieces of evidence” meet the viewer in the gallery. They do not proclaim anything loudly; they simply exist in quiet presence—like the flowers of honeysuckle, which, in the hesitant warmth of early spring, bloom almost unnoticed.