Zhaoqi 兆琪 Jiang

“Outside and inside are both intimate; they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility. If there exists a borderline surface between such an inside and outside, this surface is painful on both sides.”  

Gaston Bachelard

Alienated to a degree by Borderline Personality Disorder, Zhaoqi兆琪 finds herself a rather gloomy soul prone to endless self-questioning, and this lonely journey is reflected in her practice. Intimate autobiographical writings and wordplay, alongside sculptural and video installation-based works, communicate traumatic human experiences to an audience. Her works focus on the double history of face and mask, for her a threshold to the inner self; a fluid frame to observe inside and outside, closed to Gaston Bachelard’s intimate “borderline surface”, she tries to achieve a reconciliation of the dissonant relationship between atypical mental health and the sense of self as a method of art therapy and world-building.

Compared to walking directly to a destination, she enjoys walking through different neighbourhoods to capture fragmented emotions and collect oral histories from the local people and migrants, translating the feelings into writing, film, and sculptural pieces, to reveal the hidden narratives of home and communities. She has always felt that life is in a state of the yellow traffic light, an in-between state, it is not easy to live with the unknown, yet she insists on living in fear to unmask herself; speaking to the younger self to comfort the inner self.