DSL Collection

By Josef Ng

Welcome to the world of decapitation, fiction and iconography, all bound within a site-specific installation. The first solo project by Xia Jing, Weapons of Assassination, focuses on the notion of nature vs. everyday reality, and assesses the tension between the natural and the man-made. What emerged then, for the artist, is the formation and fragility of society.

The mixed-media installation comprises two distinctive aspects: martial arts and industrial coal. For inspiration, the artist drew upon the pop culture of kung-fu films and the black coal, a daily life source in China.

From the classic Shaw Brothers pugilistic films to the current canon of kung-fu flicks, acts of treachery, betrayal, bloody feuds and copious beheading - not sparing gratuitous gore - are the vital elements for an engrossing experience.

A key highlight of these films is the ubiquitous weapon that the heroes and villains use, including a whole arsenal of spears, blades, swords, daggers, poisonous spikes, armours, and many more unique killing devices.

Artist Xia Jing appropriated and reproduced a model of the infamous Flying Guillotine (also known as Xue Dizi) - a tethered decapitation said to have been created many centuries ago and used by spy agents of the Yongzheng Emperor of the Qing Dynasty.

Legend has it that this ultimate killing machine was forged from a light metal so that it could be thrown like a Frisbee. The Flying Guillotine has a bucket-like shape which fits perfectly around a human head. Its sharp interior blades rotate and are positioned such that it decapitates the victim cleanly and swiftly. The wielder controls the Flying Guillotine with a long rope, so it can be hurled at the opponent and his bloody head returns, just like a boomerang.

True to its name, this murderous weapon of sheer speed and precision is one that stirs an ill-at-ease feeling when encountered. And that is exactly what the artist would like to invoke in the installation.

Stepping into the darkened installation, one will initially be awed by the eight Flying Guillotines arranged gallantly above one's Head. Disturbingly so, it's hard to stand below these weapons and not contemplate a directness of emotions, and then be confronted head-on with a constant tension of dualities within the installation - danger and innocence, pleasure and distress, fear and desire.

Yet, no one has seen what a real Flying Guillotine looks like. It could be nothing more than a fictional weapon. Aided by the juxtaposition of film and photography within the installation, the mix of reality and illusion, the dichotomy between the real and unreal, the installation places us on the edge temporally, physically and psychologically.

In the artist's own words, "I guess the creation of the weapon, whether real or not, or according to legends and tales, is partly inspired by the long history of dictatorship in China - an eternal image that sticks. My work conveys an ominous feeling, the co-existence of cruelty and power; as well as the action of hunting and killing of victims."

The artist has produced an atmospheric installation with a shifting mediated structure. Using images from films that are entrenched in the world of Asian pop culture, she recontextualises the imagery and probes psychological phenomena alongside the question not of who holds power, but of the very existence of power itself.

One could say that what the artist has created is a place of hyperrealistic extremes, emotionally but as well as literally.

The other half of the installation stems from Xia Jing's interest in the materialization of an everyday commodity - the coal. According to the artist, coal is not only a daily material but also represents the spirit of humankind. As she expresses, "it is cheap, looks dirty and feels outdated, yet it has dramatic influence on me. The essence of coal is life".

Still a daily fuel source for many in China, coal represents not only a combustive material, but also the spirit of miners who toil under harsh conditions and landscapes, often unseen to the rest of the world, where daily accidents and deaths go unnoticed from the media.

For this project, she reinterpreted these systems via an installation, using an excessive quantity of coal and its potentially unbounded nature, into what aims to be an atmospheric uncovering of the coalmining industry.

The industry's subterranean reality surfaces through the artist's casting of human heads out of coal, which are then semi-buried into the dark mass of coal, almost overflowing from the scorched black floor. There is something gorgeously eerie about this barren, elemental coal garden, and the result is a conglomeration of fragments of coal and life spilling forth, as it were, from the underground.

In another part of this installation is a huge Buddha sculpture, cast from small pieces of coal and placed atop rows of flowing silk. Although static, the life-size sculpture conjures a horrified image as it seems to be unkindly 'beheaded'. Immediately bound by a physical engagement with the viewers, the headless sculpture illustrates a very strong sense of physical energy and tension. The largeness itself is what looms large. A tall iron gate that separates us from going into the visceral darkness of the second installation, forms an almost mystical world, and cuts us from the immediate surround of a designed environment. It is a world neither here nor there, a liminal zone.

What resonates through the entire exhibition is the investigation of the transformative shift in transience from the nature of one medium to another. There seems to be a narrative between the two visual formations but it is disjointed, emerging only from the aura and embodiment of the materials.

As the artist expresses, "In exploring the possibility of transformation through art, I question current social and religious icons through the reconstruction of events, and the switch between several media."

In the world's ongoing chronicles of cultural and religious strife, the exhibition blurs the dimension between what is truth and what is make-believe. However the one thing that remains real is the cruelty and violence humankind laid upon themselves out of ambitions and desires. Xia Jing hit these issues with an explicit touch of stirred up imageries, ready to be filtered through each visitor's personal psyche.