Composed of hazy landscapes, fragmented sound effects, and the interplay of light and texture, this room simultaneously alludes to a sanctuary and an emotional complex, encompassing Xinyu 's practices and growth stories. Its vitality derives from embodying identity issues, bearing the weight of trauma and violence while engaging in a sustaining, reparative construction.
In the video, Xinyu summons her childhood self amidst mountains and waters, tragically meeting her demise at the hands of suffocating repression and anger within domestic. Entrapped within a water-walking ball, her body eventually dissolves into the river, becoming an integral part of the water cycle, transmogrifying into raindrops from the past that descend upon the present, leaking through the crevices of the ceiling. This unresolved witchery hints at such a room's intimate yet unsettling nature as an ancient ghost and a utopia of the present, where love and discipline intertwine.
Intervening and misplacing images serve as a queer touch as Xinyu navigates binary oppositions. Windows, sheer curtains, bodies of water, film, and PVC materials function as translucent mediums, lensing the realms of reality and illusion. In this cruel world, the state of hovering on the borders is not only a survival strategy but also a non-cooperating political stand — between bloodline and chosen kinship, technology and nature, geographic divisions and class disparities. The metamorphosis of images, akin to the moment when the body transcends these borderlands, evokes a throbbing pain like childbirth, sobering with ecstasy.
Flowing upstream from the story's ending, this video unfolds along the path of her mother's notes. Confronting the rawness of love, scarring, and cocooning, the room becomes a solid shell for its delicate core, vigilant and cautious. Meanwhile, within the mother's monologue, love manifests amidst chaos, a flickering crimson amidst obscurity, sincere and irresistible. They stand in opposition, yet reciprocally licking their wounds, forever locked in an embrace betwixt the strain of separation.
