Sweat, Stop, Rewrite!

The exhibition shows works by Jing Y., created in collaboration with the participants of the project Sweat, Stop, Rewrite! (SSR).

Working closely with Chinese citizens who usually are not professional writers, Jing Y. founded “Writing • Mothers” project in 2017, and has since co-produced several books of their memoirs, reflections, debates, and statements. Within this framework, she later founded Sweat, Stop, Rewrite! (SSR) project that facilitates amongst others female migrant workers to create visual narratives around their experience.

These socially engaged projects and their presentations embody her method of “using art and documentary approaches to create self-made citizenship”in a period of political difficulty. They add up to a unique profile of a major dynamic between the Party and the people in Chinese society today: while the Party maintains power by surrendering the dream of a communist future to capitalism in the present, the people are asked to exchange socialism for a chance at becoming rich right now.

In the beginning of the SSR project, Jing provided free writing and reading classes. These otherwise inaccessible tools and processes help them to articulate, reflect their complex realities and make the experiences they are facing, relatable to other social classes. After the pandemic, Jing Y. extended the originally text-based process to the medium of drawing and other forms of art making.

With more emphasis on redirecting and redistributing educational and aesthetic resources, the project consolidated the concept and the method of “rewriting”, holding up to the importance of creating “living archives” of the unrepresented that differs to the official narrative.

About Jing Y.: Jing received a BFA from Concordia University (Montreal) in 2005 and a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. Since then she has exhibited and lectured frequently in various countries, under different circumstances, with and against the given framework, to examine the contradictions and disconnections within Chinese society and between China and the wider world. Apart from exhibiting at the the 12th Shanghai Biennale, Guangdong Times Museum, Para-site, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, and Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, many of her other thematic projects/process can be found in various artist-run/alternative spaces in a more intangible way.

Curated by Antonie Angerer in collaboration with Heiko Pfreundt & Lisa Susanne Schorm

The exhibition Sweat, Stop, Rewrite! is supported by the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung