From August 9 to October 12, 2025, the Long Museum (West Bund) will present The Gaze of Pygmalion, the latest solo exhibition by artist Ji Xin, curated by poet and art critic Zhu Zhu, with exhibition space design by architect Sun Dayong. Featuring over fifty works spanning oil painting, sculpture, and works on paper, the exhibition outlines the artist’s creative trajectory and evolving spiritual concerns since 2017. The depiction of female figures has long been a signature theme in Ji Xin’s oeuvre. In the context of art history, such subject matter has traditionally been embedded within specific mechanisms of gaze and structures of desire. Yet, over more than a decade of artistic practice, Ji Xin has gradually constructed a new mode of representation, wherein female figures increasingly embody an upward-aspiring spirituality. This impulse resonates with the polyphonic spatial language of sculpture and architecture, forming a sustained dialogue with the artist’s internalized aesthetic sensibility and intuitive formal experimentation.

The exhibition title The Gaze of Pygmalion is drawn 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 Xin’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.

“We move neither eastward nor westward, but inward; for within our souls lies the divine essence, which is our true homeland.” This reflection by China’s Republican-era scholar Wu Jingxiong (John C. H. Wu) offers a subtle yet resolute spiritual compass for Ji Xin’s recent creations. From intimate portrayals of women in domestic settings to allusions to figures such as Venus, the Three Graces, the Luo Goddess, and Ariadne of Narcissus, Ji Xin continually projects his recognition of a “divine essence” through the imagined Other. In his recent works, these figures gradually detach from their narrative and mythological origins, shifting toward a more restrained aesthetic transmutation. The once discernible interior backgrounds of his earlier paintings give way to sculptural frameworks, architectural lines, and structured elements, columns, ripples, stars, and moons, invoking a sense of order. 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.

About the Artist

Born in 1988 in Jiangsu Province, China, Ji Xin received his BA and MA degrees in the Oil Painting Department from the China Academy of Art, and also studied in Paris as a visiting artist via an Exchange Project of CAA, in 2012. He is currently a PhD candidate at the China Academy of Art. Ji Xin’s practice spans painting, sculpture, and works on paper, with a sustained investigation into the interplay between image, material, and space. His work is marked by a deliberate engagement with the formal legacies of both Western classical art and Eastern visual philosophy, situating his practice within a transhistorical and transcultural continuum. 

Ji’s early works, deeply informed by classical Western painting, reveal a painterly language grounded in metaphysical contemplation and historical depth. His visual vocabulary draws upon the structural clarity of early Renaissance painting, as well as the reductive forms and spatial intelligence of modernist sculpture. Over time, his inquiry has expanded toward the metaphysical and symbolic dimensions of Eastern aesthetics, particularly those embedded in traditional cosmology, architecture, and philosophical reflection, foregrounding an inward gaze that resists binary frameworks of East and West.

More recently, sculpture has become an increasingly vital component of Ji Xin’s artistic methodology. Through it, he integrates corporeal perception, mnemonic residues, and cultural archetypes into a visual idiom that is at once restrained and affectively charged. His works often explore the tension between the sensual and the symbolic, the tactile and the transcendent, offering a poetics of form that is both formally rigorous and spiritually resonant. Ji Xin’s works have entered the permanent collections of numerous significant institutions, including ICA Miami (US); Museu Inimá de Paula (Brazil); K11 Art Foundation (Hong Kong); Long Museum, Hong Art Museum, and ASE Foundation (Shanghai); Deji Art Museum and G Museum (Nanjing); as well as Song Art Museum, X Museum, Yuan Art Museum and FutureLand Art Center (Beijing).

About the Curator

Zhu Zhu, poet, art curator, art critic, was born in September 1969. He won the Second Anne-Kao Poetry Prize, the third Chinese Contemporary Art Critic Award (CCAA) and Mountain Flowers Literature Biennial Award. He is the author of collection of poems, essays and art reviews, including Franch version poetry ‘Blue Smoke’ (2004, French version, translator: Chantal Chen—Andro), ‘Gray Carnival: Chinese Contemporary Art Since 2000’ (Collection of ‘Imaginist’ by Guangxi Normal University Press in 2013, published by ARTCO Journal in 2016). The English version poetry anthology ‘The Wild Great Wall’ is published in 2018 by Phoneme Media in United States.