System of Light
Installation
Since her arrival in Xiamen in 2006 Jin Jing the young Chinese artist, has witnessed very important changes in the city of Xiamen, significantly the realization of the Night Lighting Project where office buildings, apartment buildings and commercial street buildings, are decorated with colorful LED lights that outline buildings or decorate them with patterns.
Xiamen city started the Night Lighting Project in 2006 and is the first city which has completed a Night Lighting Project in China. Other Chinese cities are doing similar things but have yet to complete their projects.
Jin Jing has been paying attention to night lighting spaces of the city and uses them in her artistic creations. In an exhibition in CEAC in October 2008 she showed her first installation work about Xiamen night lighting project: her expression of impressions about the Xiamen City night skyline.
After half a year, this current exhibition named ‘System of Light’ is the continuation and extension of the first Night Lighting Project work. She reflected upon her first project and city space and developed this work as a result. The kind of city night scene she likes is the natural light of life, the light projected from windows of buildings out onto night sky; internal extension of city interior; representation of people’s activities at night. Vibrant night lighting scenes should represent the vibrant night life of people in this city, in her view. But when she observed the night scene in Xiamen, she discovered that many buildings don’t have that much internal light but instead their outsides were fully decorated with colorful neon lights. Can this kind of internal darkness and external brightness mimic prosperity of a city? Thus Jin Jing tries to separate the buildings from lights: a dark background and shapeless light tubes are all that are left. When you combine these two however, people see the Xiamen night lighting scene that they are familiar with. The question is ‘will they have identities on their own if they are separated?’