Ji Xin The Gaze of Pygmalion

From August 9 to October 12, 2025, the Long Museum (West Bund) will present 'The Gaze of Pygmalion', the latest solo exhibition by artist Ji Xin, curated by poet and art critic Zhu Zhu, with exhibition space design by architect Sun Dayong. Featuring over fifty works spanning oil painting, sculpture, and works on paper, the exhibition outlines the artist’s creative trajectory and evolving spiritual concerns since 2017. 

The depiction of female figures has long been a signature theme in Ji Xin’s oeuvre. In the context of art history, such subject matter has traditionally been embedded within specific mechanisms of gaze and structures of desire. Yet, over more than a decade of artistic practice, Ji Xin has gradually constructed a new mode of representation, wherein female figures increasingly embody an upward-aspiring spirituality. This impulse resonates with the polyphonic spatial language of sculpture and architecture, forming a sustained dialogue with the artist’s internalized aesthetic sensibility and intuitive formal experimentation.

The exhibition title 'The Gaze of Pygmalion' is drawn from the Greek myth of the Cypriot king who, enamored with an ivory sculpture he had fashioned in the image of his ideal woman, experienced an emotion that transcended earthly bounds. Pygmalion’s gaze and the visual feedback it elicits imply not only the creator’s projection onto the ideal form but also the deep entanglement between spectatorship and identification, fantasy and reality. The viewer projects an idealized self into the image while seeking self-confirmation within that idealized form, thus entering a self-contained cycle. Though frequently referenced in art historical and psychoanalytic discourses, this structure is consciously disrupted in Ji Xin’s work. The female figure ceases to serve as the endpoint of the gaze, becoming instead a point of departure for his broader project of image-making. His treatment—tending toward the spiritual, columnar, and abstract—redirects attention from surface allure toward the inner order of the image itself.

“We move neither eastward nor westward, but inward; for within our souls lies the divine essence, which is our true homeland.” This reflection by China’s Republican-era scholar Wu Jingxiong (John C. H. Wu) offers a subtle yet resolute spiritual compass for Ji Xin’s recent creations. From intimate portrayals of women in domestic settings to allusions to figures such as Venus, the Three Graces, the Luo Goddess, and Ariadne of Narcissus, Ji Xin continually projects his recognition of a “divine essence” through the imagined Other.

In his recent works, these figures gradually detach from their narrative and mythological origins, shifting toward a more restrained aesthetic transmutation. The once discernible interior backgrounds of his earlier paintings give way to sculptural frameworks, architectural lines, and structured elements, columns, ripples, stars, and moons, invoking a sense of order. This transformation not only expands the dimensions of viewing but also liberates the act of gazing from enclosed, private spaces, reorienting it toward a mode of vision that seeks the ontological.