SIJIN XU

In line with of the older female artist Jin Weihong (靳卫红, born 1967), Xu paints images of women that conform to truthful representations of the vast majority of women in China, rather than the exceedingly slim yet voluptuous models who tend to be rare anomalies in any society. Sand Castle 1 (2016) reveals multiple projections of a single body on the final print. The stocky body of the woman in the picture does not conform to the dimensions of an elongated western beauty, most likely because the DNA composition of most Asian women is significantly different than that of their European counterparts. The two sets of arms seem to parody the perfect male image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (ca 1490). Xu’s central subject in her two dimensional prints and three dimensional sculptures are embodiments of a counter-gaze, challenging the society’s obsessive compulsion with prescriptive claims of beauty, which in fact is fleeting and ephemeral and has no empirical basis for morality. For Xu, not just female beauty, but the Chinese ideal of female beauty, is like a sand castle. They both seem beautiful because they cannot be real. No one can inhabit the space of a sand castle, because in time, it will soon be washed away by the next wave of the pounding ocean.