Tracing the intersection of cultural displacement and gendered experience, Jingjing Xu’s art is an evolving dialogue between repetition and resistance, the British landscape and a transnational female consciousness.
Jingjing Xu (b. 2000) is an interdisciplinary artist working across moving image and digital media. Born in Guangzhou and living and working in London, Jingjing’s practice explores the themes on the intersection of intercultural tensions and feminist inquiry and resistance, tied up by the philosophy of repetition.
Positioning herself within he moving image tradition, rather than film per se, her work privileges poetic form, rhythmic montage, and symbolic environments over narrative linearity. Jingjing Xu’s works operate then as philosophical spaces – visual essays where gesture, repetition, and sound construct meaning. Moving image becomes the language “that allows emotions to flow”, as the artist states.
With moving image, she appreciates the lack of need to follow a linear narrative, enabling her to “draw with time, write poetry with sound, and express the unspoken with rhythm. In the moving image, I found the freedom to not be explained but only to be felt”.
“In the moving image, I found the freedom to not be explained but only to be felt.”
Persistence as Poetry: Sisyphus
In Jingjing Xu’s latest work, Sisyphus (2025), a figure pushes a boulder endlessly up an unseen incline, following the classical myth and being the culmination of the moving image inquiry – existential and poetic. Within this repetition lies a quiet rebellion – a gesture that transforms futility into persistence, and persistence into meaning.
The meaning especially profound, knowing that the idea came to Jingjing Xu during a particularly low time. “I felt like every day was repeating the same routine, and there would never be an end”. In this repetition, she eventually found a way to stay connected to the world. As each repetition is not entirely the same, but differs in subtle ways, “the act of pushing the stone is not only a way to rediscover the world, but also a way to rediscover myself”, explains the artist. “Perseverance is not about reaching a certain destination, but about learning to coexist with this cycle. It allows you to slowly find your own pace, language, and feelings outside of mechanical repetition”.
With a conceptual framework exploring Camus’ absurdism, where repetition as rebellion and struggle as meaning, the artist reinterprets the myth as a metaphor for contemporary existence and for women’s ongoing negotiation with social constraint. Sisyphus transforms futility into an act of defiant persistence – each push of the boulder becomes a gesture of self-definition and endurance.
“I want the audience to see in this character an energy between faith and absurdity”, she states, when discussing Sisyphus. As he seems to be practising cultivation, while punishing himself at the same time, such a state is “solemn yet vulnerable, closer to humanity than the myth”.
As a Chinese-born artist living in Britain, Xu’s works often dwell in the in-between – between East and West, tradition and modernity, belonging and alienation. With Sisyphus, she wants “the British audience to feel the power in this paradox – a vitality that is constantly dissolving and reforming”. But she also, once again, sees herself in it. “I deeply feel a sense of social atmosphere defined by solitude and order, and understated emotional expressions, while living in the UK. People are looking for meaning while maintaining the order of daily life in restraint, silence and repetition”, she explains and adds that, “this modest persistence is not a noisy passion but one with consistent resilience”.
What kind of emotions does she hope to evoke in her British audience with Sisyphus? In the rhythm of this society, where, as she explains, this kind of existentialism is not loudly proclaimed, but reserved, serene, imbued with the greyness of a rainy day. “I hope this kind of ‘British Existentialism’ will offer the audience a gentle power: the maintenance of feelings within order, and the recovery of meaning in the cycle”.
In Between Cultures
Yet, with her works tracing the intersection of cultural displacement and gendered experience, she doesn’t want to explain or reconcile such tensions. “The fissures themselves are valuable – they are spaces for new stories and new identities to be born”, Jingjing Xu says.
Gender, culture, and British society intersect in many of her works, though. Under the Veil (2024) explores the weight of tradition, family, and societal expectations faced by East Asian women. The “veil” operates both literally and metaphorically – a social fabric of concealment and protection, constraint and identity. Xu situates this within a British context: as an artist navigating cross-cultural identity and gendered expectations in a Western society that still exoticises and disciplines the Other. Here, the moving image becomes a space of unveiling then – where repetition and ritual gesture articulate a feminist call for selfhood.
“As an artist, I choose to live in this ambiguity and uncertainty, and use my artworks to present this state of fluidity rather than finding a certain answer”
While created during Xu’s early years in the UK, Coexist (2021) reflects the dislocation of arrival. The piece employs mimicry and visual repetition to explore identity performance – assimilation, observation, and reflection, marking the beginnings of the artist’s interest in British social space as both mirror and mask. “As an artist, I choose to live in this ambiguity and uncertainty, and use my artworks to present this state of fluidity rather than finding a certain answer”.
From Ritual Gesture to Immersive Vision
Xu’s practice also investigates how women confront adversity – particularly within patriarchal, social, and cultural systems, with the Sisyphean boulder representing cyclical struggle as well as persistent renewal. Both House of Unending (2023) and Something Beautiful Dies (2024) extend her inquiry into spatial confinement and ecological fragility, while integrating eco-feminist and existential concerns: how consciousness and environment intertwine.
Xu’s art redefines female subjectivity in motion, where the moving image becomes a tool of liberation and reflection. In the future, she would like to push the vision further and create an immersive installation, inviting the audience into a dream-like experience. “I want this form to blur the boundaries between reality and perception, allowing emotions to be experienced more directly and somatically”, Jingjin explains. “I believe that is my ideal form of artwork – soft, fluid, and leaves traces in a sensory experience”.
Jingjing Xu obtained an MA in Fashion Film and Digital at the University of the Arts London (2024). Her work has been shown internationally (France, Italy, U.S., UK, China, Canada, Netherlands). Exhibitions include Saturn’s Garden (Hackney Gallery, London, 2025), Replicant (Beijing, 2024), and several fashion film festivals across Europe and North America.
