Jess Xing is a fiber artist currently based in Chicago specializing in weaving. As a first-gen immigrant, her practice is as well a personal archive that explores memories of childhood home through a sense of absence. Her work is characterized by a minimalist use of materials and an invitation to play, while hinting at loss and disappointment that take time to surface.
There’s something about my work that always feels like a trickster, a prank. I always want my audience to slow down, examine, interact, or even play when they walk up to my works, only to realize later that something feels off. A suspended uncertainty. It could be that the chairs they saw are simply the ghost prints of emptiness, or that the marbles will never find their way out, or encounter one another as they move pass the woven tunnel. I can’t tell what exactly I want my audience to feel. A moment of amazement? Or disappointment? There is something about these mixed, and even contradictory feelings I have long recognized in my own life that feels quite tender and beautiful, and that is what I wish to hold in my works.
Using cotton gauze, hand woven fabric, wood, and glass marbles, I am drawn to materials that are light and relatively neutral in color. Beneath this sense of lightness, however, is a highly repetitive and labor-intensive process. My body needs to fully engage in weaving a fabric or unravelling it. The endurance of the body feels very different from the airy appearance of my work. For me, this contrast between the materiality and the weight of the making echoes the emotional register I hope my work conveys. The absence comes exactly from an intensified presentness, and this contrast resonates with many motifs of my interest, such as memories and residues of interpersonal connection. 家宅 (the House, domestic space) is a site sedimented through memory, where relationships unfold, and hence it is also an important source for my practice.