“Body Talk“ Solo Exhibition at Bowery Gallery (2022)

In this exhibition, Jenny explores human vulnerability through photographs that represent awkwardness, physical and psychological distress in relation to body, gender, space, environment and culture. 

Jenny’s focus is not meant to be on her striking body alone but, rather, on the interpersonal relations between the personal and the universal, artist and audience, and between the artist and herself. Her work offers the audience a reflection of their objectification of the female body as well as inviting them to identify with that objectification and its reversal.

Misshapes Mistakes Misfits (2018)

This project aimed to take the difficulties I experienced mentally and physically and create representations of them through photography in poetic and expressive ways.

Documented photography and performing has been employed to let the vulnerable body be visibly present rather than hidden through the use of feminist gestures, repetition, softness and scale. It is the tension between the ongoing distress I’m experiencing within my body and the highly sexualised and idealised relationship we are told to have with our bodies by the consuming society that I have explored in this project. Rather than fit in to the commercial expectation that has no space for difference, I aimed to deal with my body, my physicality, my subjectivity on my own terms, not through the sexualised gaze nor cultural pressure but through my own experience.

Untitled (2018)

This image photographed my body on a plinth in a studio setting, in reference to the advertising culture of how female body has always been objected. I intended to create a sensitive representation by presenting it like an artwork and to explore fragility and human pain.

I Can’t Take Me Anywhere (2019)

Taken as I settled into my new apartment, these photographs document my physical and mental exploration of my environment. As I contort to fit the unfamiliar spaces, discomfort and anxiety intertwine. The images present a sense of action as I hide and climb in order to create a junction between performance and photography and responding to the space around me. My difficulty coexisting with my new home raises the question of who our city’s residential spaces are design for.

I Have No Say How It’s Gonna End (2017-2018)

Diaristic documentation of myself lying down in public space every time that I feel stressed or anxious. Amelia Jones indicates in her book “Body art/performing the subject” that “our internal states of consciousness consistently relate to the object of the external world”6. In this project, by sensitively photographing my body in public realm, I aimed to express myself in an intimate way and to explore empathy and acceptance. My initial reference was “365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears” by Laurel Nakadate. She began a year-long performance in which she cried once every day in 2010. Like Nakadate, I have used repetition and discipline as a way to emphasize personal difficulty.