BLOBS, Immortalité des Formes

30 September – 30 October 2023
Solo Show – Ying Jing Jing
Galerie Ars Longa

Growing mycelia, caring for corals or inspired by the shapes of molds, artists are passionate about living things, echoing the ecological issues that are increasingly important in our societies.

Jing Jing is interested in the blob, a unicellular organism belonging to the Myxomycetes family, neither animal, plant nor fungus. Lacking a brain or nervous system, it is characterized by its viscous texture and impressive capacity for learning and reflection, making it a veritable scientific curiosity. The artist chooses to represent them in the multiple phases of their life cycle, from plasmodes, gametes to spores, her works are a veritable outpouring of life in multiple colors and shapes. Her paintings present us with rounded shapes that meet, marry or reject each other, sometimes linked by filaments, surely in homage to the networks that the blob creates when it propagates.

Art and science mingle, taking the viewer on an intimate journey into the mysteries of these primeval circular forms, the basis of all living organisms. For the artist, the blob represents a form of spirituality, vibrating and suggesting a new life, that of cells, seeds and planets, offering us a microscopic and macroscopic vision.

She also reproduces this strange texture by working with materials. The thickness and crackling of paint, the stroke of a brush, felt-tip pen or cutter are all ways in which she conveys to viewers the mysterious nature of this being. Appearing on Earth 1 billion years ago, virtually immortal and capable of developing in an optimized network, it questions our scientific knowledge, but also, in a more philosophical way, our relationship with the Earth, its splendor and our supposed superiority over it.

Viewing room