Jialin Long

Bouncing up, Push me down

When I was awarded a large studio space in the summer, the first thing I wanted to do was abandon the safe routes I was familiar with, starting with no structure, only letting my intuition bring me to where it would drift to.

I wrote down some words as a starting point. Words on my list:

a spinning dancing figure

voices in my mind

digital visual culture

reproductive politics

motherhood

society views on women ageing

…

With each item I was exploring, an up and down emotion ran through me. I let this emotion take the lead, taking a physical action at first, then awareness. I let my mind drift with the wave, without anything to hold on to. I thought about taking back control, but if I took back control, making a purpose through it, I might miss something very exciting. So I decided to let myself go and see where my mind and body led me.

It was a difficult journey, but the process was so addictive that I couldn’t hold back. A voice in my head was telling me, the excise would be transformative. Something I needed. Images appeared in my mind, they overlapped, swamped into a storm around me. I let them appear and disappear, fold and unfold, they collapsed, they overlayed. I let myself hide between them, becoming their shadows, light, or a spark. They might make no sense, or they might be saying something.

But then, some days later, looking at what I experimented with, I wondered, without a structure, what meaning might lie ahead for all of the time I spent on these things. Would the work become a shadow without a body, or like a mirror facing the night? I hoped I wasn’t chasing echoes in an empty hall. In peering into the heart of the motivations behind it, I found shelter in a space to release my feelings. I found peace in an act of liberation that allowed me to be free.

The work naturally fell into three parts. Each part has an input to another, bound by an unseen thread that wove them together in silent entanglement.

In the three screens projection “Bouncing up, Push me down”, I collaborated with a sound designer and a dancer to create a 7-minute video that captures my inner dialogue—where voices collide, mix, and unravel in a cycle.

In “Assemble body —— control your body, control your mind”, I created physical visual representation of the pressure that politics places on control over female body.

And at last, my responses to images that are like doodles from my inner spinner. I made these images as responses to an interview, a talk, a commercial, a song, or what I’ve seen, heard, or experienced in the everyday. There is too much, too many images, too many messages, too many distortions. In this uneven battle, “only magic can defeat magic”. My subconscious led me to build up layers in my images, embracing digital manipulation, software algorithms, and AI interpretation — where I see AI act like a mirror to amplify the “bad” in visual culture. In this exercise, I distort and refuse to compromise with a given visual. In the imagined world, where you try so hard to make us perfect, I do the opposite. I break harmony, embrace impurity, and disrupt balance. I was seeking a point of instability, preserving glitches and imperfections. I send real world responses to the imagined one. These are the features that make us human. And then, I found my magic power, to shatter your illusions. 

Your expectations, my dreams, the reality of life, the ideal state.

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