Zoom In Find my Digital Soul in This Cruel World

Contemporary artist Lin Jingjing is well known for creating dazzling worlds through her installation, mixed medio and video. The surreal effect created via this method immerses the viewers into another consciousness.

—Through years of education, Marxism has taught me that human development is inevitable, but every news event I see seems to be completely by chance.

Always at the moment we’re least prepared, the news uses very calm tones to speak of the most terrifying disasters. This is just like the ruthlessness of life. Who is prepared for the moment when they lose a loved one? In front of the news, we all become survivors, witnesses to violence, tragedy and disaster. Behind every disaster there is a greater disaster. Each instance of suffering eventually becomes a record of numbers. Every journalist who has reported on a disaster or tragedy moves on to waiting for and discovering the next disaster or tragedy. Who has time to linger on yesterday’s tragedy, even the shocking news from a second ago?

Have you noticed? News reports are so short in every corner of the world, as if the reporters have all undergone the same exact training. It makes us accept tragedy with familiarity, just as we accept celebrations. The news anticipates celebrations and tragedies in the same way, not even placing one before the other. They are watched together by countless viewers before rapidly disappearing, as if they never happened.

Compared to ‘what is happening now’, things like ‘what we have to say’ and ‘what we say’ seem much more important. Disasters are like culture; they are something we share. This is geography in the truest sense.

Lin Jingjing Notes on: Nobody Knows I was There, Nobody Knows I was Not There: Private Memory