In 2002, Lin Jingjing began My 365 Days, a year-long performance project. Throughout the year, she collected the strands of hair that naturally fell from her body each day and documented the process through photography and video.

Through an almost ritualistic act of repetition, the work transforms an ongoing bodily loss—one that usually goes unnoticed—into something visible. Yet the very act of preservation simultaneously confirms the occurrence of loss and its irreversibility.

The work does not attempt to resist the passage of time or the inevitability of disappearance. Instead, it makes loss itself the object of attention. Nor does it offer a means of overcoming vulnerability; rather, it creates the possibility for vulnerability to be perceived, acknowledged, and understood.

This coexistence of seemingly contradictory conditions marks one of the earliest manifestations of the paradoxical thinking that would later become central to Lin's practice. As the earliest work included in this retrospective, My 365 Days introduces an observation that has continued to resonate throughout her work: although human beings know they cannot prevent loss, they persist in recording, preserving, and commemorating. Yet it is precisely through these attempts to hold on to things that loss itself becomes most visible.

Rose, Rose

2008–2011

Photography, Performance, Video, Installation

Rose, Rose is one of Lin Jingjing's most significant long-term bodies of work, developed over more than a decade. Through the simple yet unsettling act of sewing together rose petals, Lin places repair and injury, preservation and deterioration, hope and failure within the same process.

The thread reconnects what has been torn apart, yet in doing so creates new wounds. The gesture seeks to prolong life, while simultaneously reminding us of its inevitable disappearance. The paradox embedded in the work is not merely symbolic; it emerges from an observation of reality itself. Many of the things we attempt to preserve are transformed precisely through the act of preservation.

While Rose, Rose extends the concerns with vulnerability, loss, and traces of existence first explored in My 365 Days, the artist's perspective begins to move beyond personal experience toward broader questions of human existence.

In an era increasingly devoted to healing, restoration, and optimization, Rose, Rose reveals a condition that is both widespread and often overlooked: many things are not altered by loss alone, but by the very efforts made to sustain them. The work marks an important shift in Lin's practice—from an exploration of individual vulnerability toward an ongoing inquiry into the conditions of human existence.

“Things” have memory. Its murky air can represent very personal memories, or the cultural memories of a generation. It can bring a sense of belonging to every ordinary moment, or it can bring about inexplicable terror. For a brilliant, radiant life, it is more like a cruel joke.

One must know that life is very fragile, very easily damaged. Violence, imprisonment, even persistence can turn into the most dangerous and unseen form of injury.

Though roses have sharp thorns, they are fragile. They are innocent and helpless. They look uneasily towards the uncertain future. They are wholly unprepared to be harmed, and they cannot take it.

Hope and hopelessness, love and pain, life and death, struggle and surrender, nurturing and destruction…only a fine line stands between them.

--Lin jing jing Notes " Dress "