昊美术馆展览 | 徐今今“叩击”女书之门

叩击

徐今今研究性艺术项目

在艺术世界里，徐今今首先是一位诗人，以诗学来探索语言与存在的深遥关系，这让她的艺术之声独树一帜。她始终在寻找与塑造女性之间的秘密语言，这一探求本身就是对存在的“叩击”。

自2017年起，徐今今在ThomasJ.Watson基金的资助下展开九国之旅。她在亚非欧的边缘地带收集流离失所女人的秘密、渴望、忏悔和眼泪，深入女性生活经验内部，以诗意的触感，将细碎材料转化为鲜活生动的表达。她的艺术实践集合影像、文献、声音、文本、行和装置等媒介形式，构建出多元的跨界艺术体验，揭示了语言与存在交织的纽带。

“女书”不仅是文字系统，还是承载特定群体经验、知识和价值观的文化与社会实践符号。它超越文字本身的意义，连接着历史与现实、个体与集体、内心与外界；它映射身份、性别分工、女性地位和权力关系，是女性争取话语权和自我表达的通道；它更是理解人类如何通过符号构建文化、社会关系和个人身份的窗口，引发对语言、符号和文化传播本质的反思。徐今今将诗学和“女书”联系起来，以诗歌为根基，通过揭示亲密关系中的禁忌、中女对峙、被遗忘的个体记忆，挑战共情极限的关系，构建了一种新的“见证诗学”（poetics of witness）。这种诗学挑战观众的认知，深化对人类存在境况的探讨，捕捉并呈现隐于日常生活底层的回声和梦呓。

“叩击”源自徐今今诗句“Against this earth, we knock”，既是动作也是声音的回响，象征女性向彼此及世界发出的诉求和表达。本项目深受女书最后一位自然传承人何奶奶的影响，她曾感慨，“女书是天上流泪的星星”，因她的外婆书写女书时，眼泪总不自觉地流淌——女书是向世界述说苦难的方式，也是倾听的艺术。

海德格尔曾提出“语言是存在之家”，并批评人们仅将语言当作工具。也许是时候转变我们与语言的关系了，超越表象，进入康德所说的“更深的”语言—一诗。步入徐今今构建的“叩击”三部曲——“她诗/她视/她史”，仿佛进入了存在得以显现和栖息的庇护所，这是由女性协力构筑的诗性历史和共鸣之家，一个语言能够显现和被理解的场域。

Against This Earth, She Knocks

JinJin Xu’s Research-Based Art Project

In the world of art, JinJin Xu is first and foremost a poet, exploring the profound relationship between language and existence through poetics, creating an artistic voice that is uniquely her own. She has long searched for and shaped a secret language between women—this search itself is a "knocking" upon existence.

Since 2017, Xu has embarked on a journey to nine countries with a fellowship from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation. She collected the secrets, desires, remorse, and tears of women dislocated on the margins of Asia, Africa, and Europe, delving deep inside women's lived experiences and transforming marginalized voices into vibrant and poetic expressions. Her artistic practice melds mediums such as video, archive, sound, poetry, performance and installation to construct diverse interdisciplinary works, revealing the inseparable link between language and existence.

"Nüshu" is not only a writing system, but also a symbol of culture and social practice that carries the experience, knowledge and values of a particular group. It transcends the meaning of words themselves, connecting history and reality, the individual and the collective, and the inner and outer world; it maps identity, gender divisions of labour, women's status and power relations, and serves as a channel for women's struggle for discourse and self-expression; it is also a window for understanding how humans construct culture, social relationships and personal identity through symbols, triggering a reflection on the essence of language, symbology, and cultural communication.

Xu connects poetics with "Nüshu", using the roots of poetic language to challenge our boundaries of empathy by revealing the taboos within our most intimate relations; the tensions between mothers and daughters; memories unspoken and misremembered, thus constructing a radical "poetics of witness". This kind of poetics challenges the audience's empathetic understanding, deepening our query into human existence, and attempts to capture the echoes and dreams hidden beneath ordinary reality.

"Knock" is derived from Xu's poem Against this earth, we knock, which is both an action and an echo, symbolising women's demands and expressions to each other and to the world. The project is influenced by conversations with Grandma He, the last natural heir of Nüshu, who once lamented that "Nüshu is the weeping stars in the sky", as her grandmother's tears always flowed unstoppably when she was writing the women's script— it is a way of telling the world of her sufferings, and also an act of listening.

Heidegger once suggested that "language is the house of being" and criticized people for treating language only as a tool. Perhaps it is time to change our relationship with language, to go beyond appearances and enter what Immanuel Kant called a "deeper" language-poetry. Stepping into the "Against This Earth, She Knocks" trilogy constructed by Xu — Her Poetry/Her Sight/Her History, it seems like entering a shelter where existence can be manifested and settled. This is a poetic history and resonant home constructed by women collaboratively, a collective soundscape in which language can be uttered into existence, and understood.