Rose Rose

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.

2002 年，林菁菁开始持续一年的行为项目《我的 365 天》。在这一年里，她收集自己每天自然掉落的头发，并以影像记录这一过程。

作品以一种近乎仪式性的重复行为，将身体持续发生却往往不被察觉的的流失转化为可见的存在，而这种努力本身恰恰确认了消失的发生和不可逆转。

作品并不试图抵抗流逝，而是使流逝本身成为观看的对象；作品更不提供克服脆弱的方法，而是让脆弱获得被感知和被理解的可能。

这种彼此矛盾却共存的隐喻，构成了林的创作中最早出现的悖论观念，作为本次回顾展最早期的作品，《我的365天》首次呈现了此后贯穿林菁菁创作的重要观察：人类明知无法阻止流失，却仍不断记录、保存与纪念；而正是这些试图留住事物的行为，使流失本身变得更加清晰可见。

My 365 Days (Detail) 472.5 x 98.5 inches (1200 x 250 cm) 2003

Lin Jingjing’s work perhaps alludes to art emerging in a different form. In terms of symbolic documentation, it has the power to restore certain things which have been lost, and in a certain way, to make them eternal.

Often an artist’s activities in conceiving and completing an artwork are aimed at neutralizing the destructive force of death, including every form of death, from the “microscopic” to the “massive”, from the most symbolic to the most real.

The power of art can truly turn death into an opportunity for rebirth. Perhaps there still remains a bit of anxiety. Collecting and recording a part of the body as an act of preservation has an almost eccentric, ritual order to it. No matter how complete and beautiful it appears, there is still the pressure of loss and fear.

The death of others and the disappearance of material things hit us so hard because they represent our own death. Losing loved ones and things forever is no different than a part of ourselves dying.

In this light, the funerals held for others are nothing more than a disguised form of mourning for the self.

It seems as if Lin Jingjing hopes to use her works to remove the veil that prevents us from seeing and recognizing this mechanism, bringing us directly into individual existence and the source of pain.

by Maurizio Giuffredi