In the art world, there have always been peculiar “spirits” — individuals who are self-aware, sensitive, unwilling to conform to existing systems of order, and resistant to compromising with the ordinary conventions of the world. Whether in life or artistic practice, they maintain a deliberate distance from the mainstream, as though drawing the experiences of an entire lifetime into a single line in order to detach themselves from endless and ungrounded entanglements.

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In my view, Xu Jingyu is not an artist driven by direct realism, nor does she willingly immerse herself in the “carnival of reality.” Instead, she preserves within her life a private territory belonging solely to the artist. The art she pursues seeks an imagination capable of independence from external social constraints. Her works appear untouched by fashionable contemporary discourse, yet they possess a kind of uninhibited abandon, intertwined with traces of Lolita-like psychology and Gothic enchantment.

 

Her works often construct surreal scenes that fuse sharpness, distortion, and absurdity into a unified allegorical environment. Perhaps this allegorical form itself is a direct unfolding of her lived experience and an attempt to name an inner emotional condition. One can see how Xu Jingyu transforms recurring motifs — angels, flocks of sheep, and other symbolic figures — into personal signs that simultaneously become real and mythic. In doing so, she creates a visual tension in both content and form, producing spaces where reality and dream intersect, where fragility and endurance cling to one another, and where contradictory emotional states coexist.

 

Although Xu Jingyu does not represent the complexities of reality in a direct or literal manner, this very distance from reality ultimately becomes the condition that enables her work. It allows her art to preserve subtle emotional details while foregrounding the textures of painting, photography, installation, and fiber-based materials. These delicate traces continually emerge in the experience of viewing her work.

Particularly striking are the feathered wings that recur throughout her imagery. They symbolize aspiration, but also emotional release, perseverance, and hope amid the noise and turbulence of reality. Through photography, painting, and woven fiber, Xu Jingyu transforms personal experience and imagination into acts of emotional release and reconciliation, creating works imbued with a sense of tragic beauty, and at times even quiet injury.

 

Ultimately, what Xu Jingyu seeks to accomplish is the tracing of a fragile individual life within an immense and chaotic landscape — searching for the emotional nerves and subtle sensitivities that define the trajectory of one’s fate and lived condition. In this sense, her work becomes a profoundly truthful representation of an imagined inner world: an abstract reality refracted through the interior self. It carries with it the added weight of solitude, while condensing into artistic form a detached yet singular mode of self-expression amid the clamor of the world.

- Feng Boyi