Polemoscope, Key or Transparency, a cross between an essay film and video diary, is about Jin wandering among cities and encountering different types of spaces. It primarily consists of videos and images taken and collected by the artist on a daily basis in London and China.
A city is a collection of fragments of time, and buildings are their embodiments. While the city center has been filled with mass-produced contemporary designs, only by then modernity quietly enters the edge of the city —suburbs or old city centers. Fascinated by those inadvertent “avant-garde” designs hidden in crevices of urbanization, which are partly out of pure functional needs and partly out of frustration or compromise — such as toilets in the living room, external elevators, water pipes inside one’s house… the video dives into this "modernity" and explores the subtle incongruity lies in it.
Modern design is always a failed attempt to repress its own sensuality. It is full of secrets, obsessions, and forbidden pleasure hidden just behind its attempts to project the image of a new normality. (Colominia & Wigley, 2017) As Frederick Kiesler insisted that the house is the production of "the erotic and creative instinct," and its experience is always erotic.
The video work presents the observation and comparison of three different spaces/structures: a space that encourages nudity, a reversal structure of anthropomorphic architectural body, and a structure that reflects on a topological inversion of the human body. Through the analogy between modern architecture and anatomy, exploring topics such as transparency in modernism, the definition of private space and the rights of nakedness, voyeuristic desires and narcissistic exhibitionism tendency; Jin ruminates on the relationship between space and body and desire. The subjects of these topics are not just humans or buildings, but humans and buildings; the release of "mechanical pudenda" from the wall, and the increased level of (body) exposure we are allowed to, etc. can be proofs of it.
A city is a collection of fragments of time, and buildings are their embodiments. While the city center has been filled with mass-produced contemporary designs, only by then modernity quietly enters the edge of the city —suburbs or old city centers. Fascinated by those inadvertent “avant-garde” designs hidden in crevices of urbanization, which are partly out of pure functional needs and partly out of frustration or compromise — such as toilets in the living room, external elevators, water pipes inside one’s house… the video dives into this "modernity" and explores the subtle incongruity lies in it.
Modern design is always a failed attempt to repress its own sensuality. It is full of secrets, obsessions, and forbidden pleasure hidden just behind its attempts to project the image of a new normality. (Colominia & Wigley, 2017) As Frederick Kiesler insisted that the house is the production of "the erotic and creative instinct," and its experience is always erotic.
The video work presents the observation and comparison of three different spaces/structures: a space that encourages nudity, a reversal structure of anthropomorphic architectural body, and a structure that reflects on a topological inversion of the human body. Through the analogy between modern architecture and anatomy, exploring topics such as transparency in modernism, the definition of private space and the rights of nakedness, voyeuristic desires and narcissistic exhibitionism tendency; Jin ruminates on the relationship between space and body and desire. The subjects of these topics are not just humans or buildings, but humans and buildings; the release of "mechanical pudenda" from the wall, and the increased level of (body) exposure we are allowed to, etc. can be proofs of it.
