Jie Xu 徐杰

Jie Xu is a visual communicator and illustrator from the Guangdong Province of China.

Jie Xu’s artistic practice is deeply influenced by his background in fine art and his professional experience, which largely shapes his inclination towards visual experiences. His work often focuses on the emotions that are common to people in the current social context but are easily overlooked. Using this as a starting point, Jie amplifies these feelings, particularly through the exploration of themes using editorial illustrations, to uncover new possibilities in artistic development. He prefers to catch tiny emotions and behaviours from life and express them through illustration.

Jie tries to move beyond the narrative potential of sequential illustrations and has begun exploring forms of expression such as installations and sculptures. He recognizes the importance of a cohesive interplay between the core narrative, the chosen medium, and the art form. For him, storytelling is not limited to the boundaries of a single medium but extends to the thoughtful integration of various artistic elements. By embracing diverse forms of artistic expression, he seeks to create immersive experiences that engage the audience on multiple sensory levels, inviting them to participate in the unfolding narrative.

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Side View

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The Endless Operation is exploring the relationship between multiple roles and self-perception. Self-perception refers to how individuals perceive themselves as they navigate and adapt to different social roles. It focuses on the self-perception dilemma faced by individuals in contemporary society: the alienation of the self due to the need to adapt to different roles.

In such a context, the individual is transformed into an 'instrument' in pursuit of various goals and tasks. The alienation of the human being into a program that is always running, constantly meeting the demands and expectations of his different roles, results in self-overload and collapse.

This isn’t just about economic or social alienation, but an internal, psychological alienation that arises from having to constantly meet various social role expectations. In the same context, and under the same environmental conditions, there is a risk that people will fall into a race mentality. When the expectation is that peers can achieve a higher standard, people will keep pushing themselves to achieve a higher standard and, in doing so, get caught in another new cycle.

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Nong Ni is the Chinese way of pronouncing loneliness. It is the black dog in this project that is also my inner image. It can smell my loneliness. Those illustrations sort out and record my memories of having strong feelings of loneliness when I was a child and when I grew up. It is also a visual representation of my day as a child and as an adult.

Medium:

Digital Drawing

Jie Xu 徐杰

Medium:

Social

About

Royal College of Art