Exhibition “Beyond Memory, Deep Within the Body” by Ji SonLin

Solo exhibition from December 19, 2025 to January 31, 2026

Opening reception: Friday, December 19, 2025, from 6:30 pm

Vanities Gallery is pleased to present the artist Ji SongLin (born in 1988 in Wuwei, Anhui, China), a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, and video. Trained in traditional Chinese sculpture in Shenzhen and later in contemporary art at ESA Dunkerque & Tourcoing, Ji SongLin has developed a body of work deeply rooted in intercultural dialogue and in a sensitive reading of the gestures that shape human life.

His work favors a philosophical, poetic, and anthropological approach to form. Through his ink works, sculptures, and films, the artist explores what the philosopher Shitao (1642–1707) described as the “single brushstroke,” the common origin of both writing and painting. It is within this millennia-old dynamic that Ji SongLin situates his practice, while opening this tradition to a resolutely contemporary mode of thought.

The Repeated Gesture: Memory in Motion

For several years, Ji SongLin has been working with the repetition of the line on xuan paper, a support chosen for the vibration of its fibers. His large ink surfaces are composed of rigorous lines, methodically reiterated yet never identical. This tension between apparent uniformity and genuine singularity points to a fundamental truth at the core of his work:

each line is a being, each gesture a life.

In this performative dimension of the line, his work naturally recalls artists such as On Kawara (1932–2014) or Roman Opalka (1931–2011), for whom repetitive gesture constituted a matrix of lived time. Yet where Kawara and Opalka archived duration or the passage of days, Ji SongLin creates a space in which the identity of each line takes precedence over a strict notion of chronology. His ink does not archive time; it reveals presence.

Certain works by Ji SongLin may also be associated with the vibrant materiality of Pierrette Bloch (1928–2017), with whom he shares a focus on the line, subtle variation, and the relationship between black matter and light. However, whereas Bloch favored fragmentation and punctuated tension, Ji SongLin explores a continuum—an almost meditative density in which the gesture becomes an inner landscape.

Between China and France: Traditions, Displacements, Continuities

Ji SongLin’s works are nourished by an immemorial Chinese spiritual heritage, one in which painting, gesture, and meditation are inseparably intertwined. As Shitao once stated:

“I let things follow the obscurity of things, and dust mingle with dust; thus my heart is untroubled, and when the heart is untroubled, painting can come into being.”—Shitao, Comments on Painting by the Bitter Gourd Monk, 17th century.

This philosophy permeates the artist’s ink works, for which painting is never decorative: it is a space of concentration, presence, and circulation.

His film practice follows a similar movement of cultural resonance. The landscapes of northern France—slag heaps, mining archives, and collective memory—become material for symbolic exploration. In Eating the Mountain (2020), the images are organized around the sensitivity of place, a form of human geology, and a meditation on resources, labor gestures, and systems of transmission. Here, China and France enter into dialogue not through political realities, but through what binds civilizations together: narratives of labor, materiality, memory, and transformation.

A Plastic Vocabulary in Constant Formation

Ji SongLin’s research is never confined to a single medium. Each work and each cycle contributes to a true visual grammar. The line circulates like a breath that structures space; sculpture becomes trace, imprint, or resonance of an original gesture. Video opens onto a moving narrative, while photography explores the slow disappearance of the image over time, as though each capture already contained its own evanescence.

His work thus constructs a “system of correspondences,” in the Baudelairean sense of the term: a world in which materials, gestures, and memories call out to one another.

An Exhibition Conceived as a Passage

For this exhibition at Vanities Gallery, Ji SongLin presents a group of recent works centered on gesture, trace, and the transformation of matter. Large-format ink works enter into dialogue with videos, while photographic works create transitional spaces. Together, the exhibition forms a poetic, almost musical passage: an inner landscape composed of shadows, transparencies, and breaths.

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