Exhibition: X Museum Triennial 2023: 'Home Is Where the Haunt Is'
“Fungus Gnat Dance” is Min Jia’s anthropomorphic fantasy of fungus gnats. After their houseplants were infected with fungus gnats, the artist discovered that soapy water would dissolve the insects’ skin. In this painting, the artist attempts to depict the gnats as fragile, light, and agile.“Falling Goose and Flying Goose” is based on the myth of the turtle who wanted to fly. As supporting characters in the story, the geese are the turtle’s subject of envy. “White Peacock” and “White Peacock‘s Shadow” echoes the novel the artist is writing. It tells the story of a group of youths who adapt to living on an island of white peacocks. The drawings illustrate the artist’s fascination with Shaanxi shadow puppetry, as the joints of the bird figures are highlighted by gears to create puppet-like anthropomorphic forms. Min Jia suffers from fibromyalgia, an incurable pain disorder. This portrayal of human anatomy through puppetry and its mapping of a traditional Chinese system of thought about cosmology and human acupoints expands the artist’s visual understanding of mutation.
Min Jia (b.2001, Xinjiang) lives and works in Berlin. Min Jia approaches narratives of migration and adaptation through a surreal, metamorphic lens. Their paintings depict the necessity to fill and be filled—eating, dwelling, burying—how bodies transform into interchanging vessels that carry one another and the environment at large. Their work begs the question: 'how far can the body stretch?' Min Jia graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2021.