The Gaze of Pygmalion: Female figures and upward-aspiring spirituality

The Long Museum West Bund will present The Gaze of Pygmalion, the latest solo exhibition by artist Ji Xin, from August 9 to October 12, 2025.

Curated by poet and art critic Zhu Zhu, the exhibition features over 50 works spanning oil paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, offering visitors a glimpse into the artist's creative journey and evolving spiritual concerns since 2017.

While the depiction of female figures has long been a signature theme in Ji's oeuvre, the artist, over more than a decade of artistic practice, has gradually developed a new mode of representation, wherein female figures increasingly embody an upward-aspiring spirituality.

The exhibition's title, The Gaze of Pygmalion, comes from the Greek myth of the Cypriot king who, enamored with an ivory sculpture he had fashioned in the image of his ideal woman, experienced an emotion that transcended earthly bounds. Pygmalion's gaze and the visual feedback it elicits imply not only the creator's projection onto the ideal form but also the deep entanglement between spectatorship and identification, fantasy and reality. The viewer projects an idealized self into the image while seeking self-confirmation within that idealized form, thus entering a self-contained cycle.

Though frequently referenced in art historical and psychoanalytic discourses, this structure is consciously disrupted in Ji's work. The female figure ceases to serve as the endpoint of the gaze, becoming instead a point of departure for his broader project of image-making. His treatment – tending toward the spiritual, columnar, and abstract – redirects attention from surface allure toward the inner order of the image itself.

In this exhibition, the once discernible domestic setting of his earlier paintings has given way to sculptural frameworks, architectural lines, and structured elements such as columns, ripples, stars and moons. This transformation not only expands the dimensions of viewing but also liberates the act of gazing from enclosed, private spaces, reorienting it toward a mode of vision that seeks the ontological.

Ji, who views artistic creation as a temporally unfolding dialogue, longs for a reciprocal current between himself and his work, a current that generates an upward-aspiring perception. In keeping with this desire, he has quite literally turned his figures into statues.

Abandoning the earlier emphasis on flattened, relief-like contours, his recent works heighten texture and volume so that the women appear as tangible presences standing in vast, solemn space, the exhibition's curator Zhu noted.

Born in 1988 in east China's Jiangsu Province, Ji received his BA and MA degrees in oil painting from the China Academy of Art, and also studied in Paris as a visiting artist via an exchange project of the CAA in 2012.

If you go

Date: Aug 9 to Oct 12 (10am-6pm, Tuesday-Thursday; 10am-9pm, Friday-Sunday)

Venue: Long Museum West Bund

Address: 3398 Longteng Ave

Tickets: 140 yuan (Tuesday-Thursday); 200 yuan (Friday-Sunday)