Beijing Project n.07 Lin Jingjing 林菁菁

Lin Jingjing 林菁菁 chose to continue and develop one of her ongoing relational projects, The Color of Memory, as her intervention for the Social Sensibility programme. After visiting the factory a few times, she began collecting very personal information from the staff through three questions: Think back to your earliest memories: what is your most painful memory? If that memory could be turned into an object, what would it be? What colour would you use to describe it?

From the answers she made a custom painting for each person. In a way very similar to a production line, she gave material form to their answers, memories and projections on a series of square canvases, later shown in the factory.

The project is demanding because it requires a great deal of trust and empathy between the artist and a largely unknown audience. Its promise is to use this fragile, uncomfortable ground of encounter to create a new kind of bond between the artist and the other person. Unusually, the connection happens from the start on a very private level: someone chooses to reveal something deeply personal to an unknown artist and accepts a very exposed position, bearable only through the mediation of the artistic process. The exchange between them lives on, symbolically, in the finished painting – a strange product in which authorship is unclear and the line between subjective and objective perception disappears.