In Xiaojing Yan’s Under the Pines, Over the Clouds, a series of seemingly disparate works come together to weave an intricate tapestry of diaspora life and womanhood. Her work is a constant dialectical interplay, bringing together sharply contrasting influences and themes - the traditions of ancient China meld into the turbulence of the contemporary globalized world; human-made visions of eternity coalesce with the wild, unrestrained growth and decay of nature; the ‘mundane’ material world reveals the spiritual realm of ghosts and the sublime.
Nature is easily the most omnipresent element in Yan’s work, both as material and collaborator. As materials, elements of nature play a highly symbolic, multifaceted role. Traditional Chinese landscape paintings (a major influence on Yan) utilized semi-imaginary depictions of nature in order to evoke spiritual ‘landscapes of the mind’. In Mountain of Pines, Yan - along similar lines, but playing a different game entirely - uses pine needles to ‘semi-depict’ these depictions; she puts a contemporary twist on ancient traditions using that most ancient element, nature, which precedes all traditions. At the same time, nature in Yan’s work remains long after all traditions are gone. The lingzhi mushrooms and moss-like fungal spores that coat Lingzhi Girl in her later stages of transformation or Far From Where You Divined evoke a similar sense of temporality to the “vast and trunkless legs of stone” in Shelley’s Ozymandias. They are, of course, different - while Yan’s mushrooms still spell doom for the monuments of humanity, they will continue to grow long after the erosion of said monuments; in the case of Lingzhi Girl, they give these monuments new shapes and new lives. On a human timescale, they exist as a form of decay; beyond humans they will live forever.
Just as important as Yan’s materials are her methods of creation. Spirit Cloud consists of over 33,000 pearls, threaded together to evoke a cloud or a lingzhi mushroom - yet doing so in an abstract enough manner that the shimmering interplay of pearls, which reflect the light in countless dazzling ways, might evoke anything from the bubbles of underwater currents to a nebula of stardust. While it shows the myriad faces of nature, Spirit Cloud also highlights the painstaking quest of humanity to tame nature, its intricacy calling to mind an almost religious devotion - an image furthered by the light it basks in and refracts like a stained glass window. Yet perhaps ‘spiritual’ is a better word for Yan’s work. Mountain of Pines consists of thousands of pine needles woven into sheets of fabric so thin as to be translucent. Looking at it, one can see viewers on the other side doing the same, ghosts amidst seas of fog. Through Yan’s determined labour, mundane natural objects turn into conduits for spirits. If the aforementioned two works embody painstaking agency (the oh-so human cry of ‘I was here’) then Lingzhi Girl and Far From Where You Divined represent ‘leaps of faith’ in which nature is a collaborator of Yan, assisting in the works’ creation on its own. To create these mycelial sculptures, Yan packs lingzhi spores and woodchips into molds and nurtures the mushrooms to ensure growth. Once sufficiently grown, the mold becomes unnecessary, as the fungus is strong enough to hold itself together, and Yan simply allows nature to run its course. She calls the process a “hybrid bio-art experiment, which relies as much on science as it does on fate”. The process is a constant dialogue with nature - the human-made statue, a symbol of immovability, is infiltrated and eventually supplanted by the growth of the lingzhi. In the end, it is the sculptural mold that ‘dies’ and the lingzhi that remains, an untouched eternity alongside the long-gone imprints of humanity. It evokes ancient ruins one might find in the depths of a forest.
The ‘leap of faith’ is most explicit in Marking, a set of two bronze sculptures created from clay molds of household objects, preserving them for all time. Mounted on the gallery walls, the sculptures look as though they have been wrenched away from each other, with one of them vainly stretching out a pair of hands but finding nothing to grasp. It is unmistakably a product of the diaspora experience, as are the exhibition’s other works. The ‘leap of faith’ highlights the terror in any form of transition, be it between countries or within one’s own body. The early stages of Lingzhi Girl’s transformation are grotesque and terrifying, yet she emerges serene. Marking also remains similar to the other work in this exhibition through the importance of materials - clay to highlight the “tactile footprints” of the selected objects, bronze as a traditional Chinese material “celebrated for its lasting strength”. Moreover, Marking highlights the women in Yan’s life - “especially [her] mother and mother-in-law.” To be sure, the entire exhibition is deeply immersed in womanhood. The use of weaving and fabric (‘traditionally feminine’ things) in Mountain of Pines, combined with its sheer intricacy and the amount of painstaking labour it must have taken, highlights the historic underappreciation (and over-exploitation!) of female domestic labour, as well as the pivotal and often overlooked role women always play - “[t]heir unending acts of care form the hidden tapestry that binds our homes together.” One could make a similar point about Spirit Cloud and its interwoven array of pearls, dotted along nearly invisible strings like so many necklaces.
Under the Pines, Over the Clouds, despite its relatively small size (it is a solo show, after all) manages to say a lot. Yan’s work goes into several themes in depth: it shows the Chinese diaspora experience of negotiating old tradition and global contemporaneity; through both painstaking effort and ‘leaps of faith,’ it highlights the duality of humanity and nature; it is a celebration of womanhood and women. Just as Yan weaves so many disparate elements together in order to create her art, in the end the exhibition’s many themes coalesce into one - a shifting dialectic between immovability and impermanence must, in the end, go the route of the latter. There is only one variety of eternity, as Yan’s life as an immigrant and work as an artist shows - that of eternal change.