What Would You Hear If You Could? (Macau)

Butter Room, Macau, 2025

Buried utterances, dislocated voices, memories fragmented and illegible—by carving nüshu (women's script) testimonies into ever dissolving ice everyday for three weeks, artist JinJin Xu grapples with the power of opacity to erase/unearth our collective voices.

"A thousand kinds of presence—this is a "poetics" that exists only to vanish, a "testimony" woven from absence and representation. JinJin Xu, as an interdisciplinary, project-based artist and poet, who has long lived and worked between Macau, Shanghai, and New York, she draws upon her sharp insight and sensitivity cultivated from moving across cities and borders. Through poetry, installations, experimental films, and performances, she witnesses the secret dialects, stutters, and whispers of displaced women across the margins of nine countries on five continents. Xu’s artistic practice constantly moves along the liminality between “existence” and “disappearance.” She deliberately juxtaposes the materiality of diverse mediums (such as charcoal and ice), with the near-extinct language of Nüshu, the women’s script of China.

This solo exhibition “What Would You Say If You Could?”, as Xu's first in Macau, expands her poetic (poesis) practices into dissolving the “invisible” personal narratives into a flowing collective subconscious. It is yet another archaeological journey through the cultural code of Nüshu—through poetry of her, script of her, history of her—subtly and delicately transforming the lived experiences of women into installations: printing memory through rubbing, liberating narrative through melting sculpture, and weaving a tapestry of contemporary collective soundscape. At its core, the exhibition creates a participatory paradox centred on listening: only through continuous representation can absence itself be perceived. The collective sound field that lingers in the exhibition space may be interrupted, overlapped, or displaced at any moment—forcing the viewer to actively reconstruct meaning within the "void."

Xu’s poetic language hides within a surreal reverberation, interwoven with documentary sounds, constructing a shared, multifaceted intersecting point of empathetic listening. When Paul Klee said “Art is what makes the invisible visible”, Xu goes further to the sensible (le sensible) through the unique soundscape. We then become witnesses to stories that were meant to be forgotten. Perhaps, the real “presence” may only emerge after the spectators have left—in those lingering echoes, in the unspoken stories that still resonate in the air."

(curator note: Kathine Cheong)

埋藏的话语、错位的声音、支离破碎且难以辨认的记忆——通过将女书的秘密刻在不断融化的冰块上，艺术家徐金金努力利用不透明的力量来消除/挖掘我们集体的声音。