Artist: Jenny
Curator: Zhang Yining
Exhibition: Nov 21 — Dec 4, 2025
Venue: PHOTISM Complex, Chengdu
⸻
Around 6 p.m., the light at PHOTISM begins to fade.
The space warms up slowly, like someone taking a quiet breath after holding it too long.
Jenny sits beside her images.
In person, she feels softer, blurrier than her work—
almost like a dream that hasn’t fully woken up.
She tells me, almost apologetically:
“I don’t really like being called an artist.”
But her images answer for her—
those trembling lights, hazy silhouettes, and colors caught between consciousness and sleep.
They whisper a truth she never says out loud:
She’s already making art.
Just very quietly.
⸻
01 She’s not “creating.” She’s simply leaving traces of her life.
By day, Jenny works in the internet industry—
a fast, sharp world built on logic, clarity, KPIs, and constant pressure.
Her image-making is the opposite of that:
no deadlines, no precision, no clear answers.
Just a slow leak of emotion.
She says:
“It’s not my job. It’s where I put my feelings.”
During Beijing’s lockdown, she bought a camera just to kill time.
She couldn’t go outside.
So she photographed whatever was around—herself, a corner of light, blurry objects.
There was no plan.
No ambition.
Just breath.
And somehow, without meaning to,
a beginning appeared.
⸻
02 The world has no clear edges. Her images don’t either.
Jenny’s images carry a kind of fog.
Foregrounds blur.
Colors flip.
Slow shutters pull the light into soft distortions.
She shrugs when I ask her about “methods”:
“I intentionally avoid learning too much theory.”
She doesn’t trust frameworks.
She trusts instinct.
Her images feel like the moment when a thought rises to the surface but decides not to say anything after all.
Like waking up in the middle of the night and trying to remember what you were dreaming.
She says:
“The world isn’t black or white.
There’s a lot of grey.
I want people to stay in that grey for a bit.”
Standing in front of her work, you can feel your heartbeat slow down—
as if the light is gently pulling you inward.
⸻
03 Opening day: she looked like a bride who’s quietly zoning out at her own wedding
She sent friends exhibition invites.
At least five of them asked if she was getting married.
And honestly, the opening did feel like a wedding—
people arriving, greeting, hugging, drinking, smiling,
a kind of soft chaos.
But the most “wedding-like” moment happened afterward.
When everyone left, she walked past the projection in the back room.
It was just her and the images glowing in the dark.
She stopped.
“That was the first time I felt like I was with them.”
Not as their creator—
but as someone sharing the same air.
She said she felt strangely calm.
Calm in a way that would’ve scared her if she’d been at work.
⸻
04 Three cities, three lives — she moved like weather
Changsha was warm and bold.
Beijing was sharp, dry, full of seasons and sunlight.
Chengdu is soft, familiar, but still somehow foreign.
She never needed to justify moving.
She simply said:
“Changing cities is like jumping from one well into another.”
The real well is your inner rhythm.
No matter where she lived, she kept the same rituals:
shooting, cooking, thinking, drifting.
The place changed,
but the self stayed steady.
⸻
05 She acts casual, but her seriousness is like a whisper with a blade inside
Her exhibition looks effortless.
But every detail is intentional.
A mis-angled light created a soft “moon” on the wall.
She kept it.
Prints meant to hang flat ended up gently drooping.
She kept that, too.
She’s chilled on the outside, precise on the inside.
“I treat the process lightly, but the presentation seriously.”
That duality defines her:
soft edges, sharp attention.
⸻
06 The future? As light as air
She has zero hunger for the “art world.”
No career plan.
No monetization strategy.
When I ask if she’ll keep photographing, she laughs:
“I probably will.
But maybe I won’t.”
It sounds casual,
but you can feel she already knows the answer.
Image-making is her way of meeting the world—
gently, privately, without explanation.
It’s a small, honest ritual.
⸻
07 Introducing herself was harder than making the work
At the end of the interview, she faced the camera again.
Her shoulders stiffened instantly.
After a long pause, she finally said:
“Hi, I’m Jenny. I’m an image-maker.”
No labels.
No identity armor.
Nothing forced.
Just a person standing in a pool of soft, blurry light—
a line that has finally learned how to bend.
⸻
Epilogue
Jenny’s images don’t try to convince you of anything.
They don’t pose, don’t demand, don’t lecture.
They simply exist—
like emotions leaking into the air,
like the outline of a dream slowly settling,
like a quiet moment suddenly remembered.
Just as her exhibition title says:
“Let a stiff line move freely through time.”
She is that line.
And she’s still moving,
quiet but unmistakably alive.