Echoes Across Generations (2025), the moving image work by visual artist Jingyi Zhang is full of dichotomies and symbolism. Its opening scene shows two women, one dressed in black, the other wearing white, walking in opposite directions and passing each other in a dim lit living room, in slow motion, until they disappear into a black screen. In the following sequence, a cohort of six women, again dressed either in black or white, are in the same living room engaging in different solo activities. One is pirouetting, another sits a sofa, one at a table, one plays the piano, the other picks up a book from a shelf.
While coexisting in the same domestic space, they don’t look or speak to each other, in fact they don’t interact at all: it’s like each of them belongs to a different timeline, juxtaposed and reproduced simultaneously in a wide shot. It’s hard to tell if these are different characters or mere iterations of the same person, as their faces remain largely unintelligible.
Zhang storytelling is not linear, yet in its thematic vagueness it remains stylistically coherent, evocative if a bit gloomy. The video jumps from collective scenes, like the one mentioned above, to personal ones where the single protagonist is shown through a rainy window, or a flickering grainy film, while melancholically playing the piano or looking at a blank tv. Every shot is ephemeral, like a dream, a memory, or an echo, as implied by the very title, and vanishes into the next.
Though not immediately discernible, the artist is tackling family relationships and the complex task of identity formation amid a multitude of subjects bound together by a common history. By repeatedly splitting the screen, Zhang tries to convey both the interconnectedness and distance across these family members, the friction, incommunicability and intergenerational wounds that keeps them linked and apart at once.
The tension between selfhood and broader familial and social structures is a recurring theme in Zhang’s practice, which she explores by paying particular attention to the body, its physicality and movement, and its role in storing memories, traumas, intimacy, and one’s whole emotional universe. Despite this, the character’s faces are expressionless, and give away little to no emotion. Indeed, while certainly atmospheric, Zhang’s work relies heavily on its symbols, lacking a dimension of personal affect that makes the subject of her work immediately relatable, or easy to connect with.
In the final scene of Echoes, two women sit at the opposite ends of a long table, a shattered vase stands in the middle of them, fragments strewn all around it. A glaring allusion to the delicate texture of human relationships, the fragility that every interaction exposes, and the potential loss that lies within any form of emotional entanglement.
Written by Annalisa Giacinti
