This story was originally published by ArtsATL.
“We sought refuge in our apartments,” artist Jinjin Li tells us of herself and her friends, a group of young Chinese women who temporarily lived in Atlanta as international students during the period of about 2022 to 2024. Such self-imposed isolation, mentioned briefly in the wall text of her show “In Her Company” at Mint Gallery through June 1, hardly seems like the optimal starting point for creating great work; it runs slightly counter to our convictions that artists should be bold and art should be exploratory. Nonetheless, in this SCAD MFA thesis show, it becomes the peculiarly compelling vantage for a strong and moving series of photographs.
Li’s reasons for seeking refuge aren’t mentioned in the text, and they’re not centered in the images, but the context looms large nonetheless. The context is large for one thing, and, for another, it belongs to the viewer as much as it does to her. Atlanta is a violent city, and our country is so beset by political and cultural rifts at this point that there is increasingly plausible speculation of potential turns to fascism and civil war.
Weighing particularly heavy here is an event that occurred shortly before Li’s arrival and which no doubt factors into her view of the city. In 2021, a conservative religious maniac targeted Asian women in the Atlanta area during a shooting spree that resulted in the deaths of eight people. All times are difficult, the context is always terrible, but it’s fair to say the current time is particularly fraught.
Credit: Photo by Jinjin Li
Credit: Photo by Jinjin Li
In a series of somber portraits, she presents her subjects with a raw, crystalline immediacy, capturing their physical bodies in environments where their presence seems somehow transitory, ghostlike and ephemeral, a notion made more literal with the occasional use of double exposure. Situating landmarks and other such characteristic details are all but excluded, as are dramatic action and even facial expression.
Credit: Photo by Jinjin Li
Credit: Photo by Jinjin Li
In the show’s central series of portraits, Li captures her friends in isolated, contemplative moments, whether singly, in pairs or in small groups. Portraits are most often shot against the poignantly nondescript background of temporary apartment homes in Atlanta but also in places around the city that are almost haunting in their unexceptionality and alienating anonymity: chainlink fences, brick walls, barren winter branches.
Credit: Photo by Jinjin Li
Credit: Photo by Jinjin Li
There is one tender scene of escape: A large photograph shows an improvised, desultory picnic on the disappointingly humdrum shore of a lake outside the city. The work’s title, “Stop and look at me,” carries both an invitation — the point of a photograph, after all, is stopping and looking at its subjects — and a note of exasperation: The displaced subjects, possibly exhausted by their status as perceived outsiders, have sought refuge in a place where remoteness guarantees few people can either stop or look. The same lake tellingly becomes the abstract, epic background for a touchingly intimate moment in another large work, “Blue embrace.”
In a series of accompanying still lifes and landscapes, Li’s eye seeks out and finds things remarkable — almost mysterious and mythic — in their bleak mundanity and inconsequentiality: the back of a plastic chair, a utility workers’ spray-painted arrow pointing to a seemingly ordinary stretch of gutter and sidewalk, some crumbling plaster next to a metal and concrete barrier pole. The backgrounds suggest an inscrutable, uninviting, creepily vacant place, where the talismans, old stuffed animals and enormous so-cute keychains seem especially pathetic and ineffective.
Friendship is the lifeblood here. It’s a subject rarely depicted in contemporary art, and it’s all the more moving for that. With an impressive balance of tenderness and sharp-sightedness, she renders friendship’s fragility, its transience, its solace, even its insufficiencies, but primarily its ultimate necessity.
ART EXHIBIT
“In Her Company”
Through June 1 at Mint Gallery. Noon-5pm Fridays-Saturdays and by appointment. 680 Murphy Ave. SW, Suite 2095, Atlanta. 404-968-9153, mintatl.org
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
MEET OUR PARTNER
ArtsATL (artsatl.org) is a nonprofit organization that plays a critical role in educating and informing audiences about metro Atlanta’s arts and culture. ArtsATL, founded in 2009, helps build a sustainable arts community contributing to the economic and cultural health of the city.
If you have any questions about this partnership or others, please contact Senior Manager of Partnerships Nicole Williams at nicole.williams@ajc.com.
About the Author
