Description
With a background in journalism, Jacney now lives in Beijing as a video producer in Phoenix New Media. She has worked in press like Vice, Nowness, Brut, Tecent, Sixthtone, and has participated in numerous reports. She is interested in all kinds of subjects: subcultures in China, the migration of the rural population to big Chinese cities, the entertainment styles of the elderly…
At the Artificial Dusk project commission, Jacney tells us for the first time her personal stories in the form of newsprint, with a layout in a semi official press, semi gossip magazine style. Through a mixture of new, old family portraits and childhood photos, the artist captures the screen of a wedding clip of her uncle in 2001. The texts of his diary dating back to fourteen years, articles Press releases in English and Chinese that speak of family planning policy, it offers us a journey back in time. The work called Nanhai Girl is a play on words in Mandarin. Nanhai, which means the South Sea (of China), is also another name for the word “boy”. It reveals the frustration of a girl who grew up in Fujian, one of the regions where the problem of gender inequality is most present. She used the photos of her mother a lot in the newspaper to show the complex relationship between these two women of different generations. We sometimes see her mother who carefully picks her daughter’s white hair (photo taken in 2020). But ironically, the text from his diary dated over a decade ago recounts the unfair treatment of her family towards her and her brother, denouncing her mother as a victim of gender inequality while also being a defender of this inequality.
At the end of the diary, it is 2020. The epidemic unintentionally reunites the family locked up at home. The mother playing Majong while hiding, the day spent in bed with a smartphone. The boredom also caused the girl to put the old photos in the house. At the end we see a kind of compromise.
The artist refers to the Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel, who also had her struggle between journalist photography and artistic photography.
