Jinchi’s new body of work is an artistic response to pervasive social and political violence. Revisiting Sadegh Hedayat’s modernist classic, The Blind Owl, Jinchi explores the universal tropes of pain and violence threaded throughout the novel. One particular passage is explored repeatedly across various mediums –

“I write only for my shadow, which is cast on the wall in front of the light. I must introduce myself to it.”

Jinchi dismantles the text, drawing fragments of the letters onto patches of paper that are then stitched together with copper thread into quilts. She paints the sentence onto raw canvases where the characters evoke a battlefield strewn with the wounded. Each line of the first page of the book is rendered into sculptural form; Jinchi painstakingly cuts each letter from a sheet of copper, forming it into abstract shapes by hand, and stringing it onto a chain fabricated from copper safety pins.

Hedayat’s text is compulsively altered, distorted and reassembled into artworks that are intricate, ornate, and vibrant. Jinchi draws her palate from the colors of a bruise as it heals— blue, fuschia, red, purple, and black. By making utterly beautiful pieces in rich hues to represent pain and violence, Jinchi disrupts visual perception. Only by looking beyond the surface, can one see the complex interrelations between divergent elements across the exhibit.