Text by Li Suchao
For Xue Ying, family, individual growth, and female experience have long served as the cornerstones of her artistic practice. As a feminist activist, she maintains a unique life energy that accumulates within her before being released. In her latest solo project, The World Managed to Teach us How to Sing Our Song, presented at Arch Gallery, the mobilization of bodily perception and the metaphor of life energy lie latent throughout the work. These are realized through the artist's active exploration of materials and space.
A group of metal installations, Church, Home, Sweet Love (2025), which occupies nearly half of the gallery floor, is constructed from several iron plates and welded iron needles. Some resemble cages, while others feature razor-sharp points facing upward; they are imbued with defensiveness, aggression, estrangement, and danger, yet they simultaneously stir the viewer's curiosity, inciting an irresistible urge to touch them. The artist deliberately preserved the original metallic luster and etched traces of these second-hand steel materials—scavenged from construction markets—granting them a certain primal coldness. Quietly arranged across the floor, they nonetheless stand ready to pierce that silence and inflict pain at any moment.
This seems to run counter to the tenderness conveyed by the work’s title; the "Church," "Home," and "Love" celebrated as classical values are translated by the artist, through hard and cold materials and forms, into a kind of existential pain. They serve as sanctuaries providing shelter, yet simultaneously reveal the discipline and authority lurking behind them, as well as the invisible suppression and violence that may lie in wait.
Drawing on her professional training in fashion design, Xue Ying excels at utilizing and leveraging the materiality of materials as a means of symbolic expression. She frequently juxtaposes materials with distinct attributes—hardness and softness, industry and the body, fixation and fluidity—revealing a unified form of contradictory opposites through these relationships. In the exhibition's eponymous work The World Managed to Teach us How to Sing Our Song (2025), rubber tires are flattened, cut open, and entwined with hand-woven wig braids to constitute an installation of immense visual tension. As a highly durable consumable of industrial civilization, the tire is often viewed as a symbol synonymous with masculinity, while soft, long hair is consistently seen as a signifier of female sexual characteristics. However, in this work, the two exhibit a degree of characteristic reversal: the tire is forcefully torn apart, while the long hair is twisted into resilient ropes that fill the tire’s gaping wounds. Here, through the manual actions of the creative process—and even a certain violent intervention—the artist completes a dramatic act that suspends power relations and established orders.
Consequently, it is not difficult to perceive the rhythm of "sing" as indicated by the title. It does not point toward a predetermined sound, but rather signifies a form of existence, a bodily event—the manifestation of the subject’s presence. In the installation Stand, Steel (2025), a pair of pantyhose is stretched to its limit, reaching from the ceiling to the floor. A metal mesh stretches the crotch area open, while the feet are secured by two pieces of rebar bolted into the floor. Damaged areas are coated with silicone, resembling a body that is both dangerous and extremely fragile. The combination of these materials pushes this bodily perception to the foreground. The pantyhose and silicone, intimately associated with human skin, clash with cold industrial metal to produce a dissonant interval. This is a defensive state learned from internalized violence—a bodily rhythm that perpetually wanders the blurred boundary between intimacy and danger.
Looking down toward the ground, the opposing installation Little Sink (2025) utilizes a circulating water pump to create an automated flow. Inside the iron tray holding the water lies a cluster of silicone-coated pantyhose and several pearls. The inspiration for this work flashed from Xue Ying’s daily experience of washing clothes in a basin; it is precisely this private and universal scene of domestic labor that connected her to the often invisible female labor within the home. These labors are embedded into the rhythms of the body through circular, repetitive, and mechanical patterns. The pantyhose huddle and float in the water, trapped alongside the pearls within the iron-bordered container, forming a miniature landscape.
The formation of a pearl stems from the continuous irritation of a mollusk’s body—secreting, coating, and accumulating layer by layer to finally create a pearl for ornamentation and display. In this work, this process forms a subtle correspondence with the experience of female domestic labor: emotions, trauma, responsibilities, and externally imposed pressures are silently absorbed by the body, transformed over long periods into a seemingly smooth and gentle output. The circulation of the water here acts like an endless operational mechanism; it makes labor appear natural and necessary, yet for that very reason, renders it all the more difficult to perceive.
This theme concerning repetitive labor, order, and internalization first emerged in one of her early video works, Individual Training Mechanism (2017). In the video, she performs continuous sit-ups; with each ascent, her forehead must touch a small bundle of rice encased in pantyhose. As the repetitions increase, her pace gradually slows, and her physical strength is steadily exhausted. An intangible mechanism acts like an invisible cage; beneath it, the individual learns how to act and endure, and how to position oneself within it. Separated from the video by a single wall is a set of small ceramic works, Together (No.12) (2025), which pulls our gaze back to the level of intimacy—two identical teapots are joined together, resembling a pair of breasts, as smooth as porcelain and just as fragile.
In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir wrote: "Presence in the world... necessarily implies a position in the body, which is both a thing of the world and a point of view on this world; but this body does not necessarily have to have this or that particular structure" (de Beauvoir, 1949). It is in this precise sense that Xue Ying’s creations continuously summon the presence of the body. In her works, the body never appears as a specific, complete form; rather, it is constantly generated and anchored within specific contexts, perpetually placed into the world to experience friction against it. It sings within the world, and it is precisely the world that teaches it how to sing.
