BurniGRay (Jingru Ao)

About

BurniGRay is a Chinese contemporary artist who received an MFA degree in Arts and Humanities from the Royal College of Art in 2024. Her work primarily includes installations, moving images, and painting, deeply rooted in spatio-temporality and the arbitrariness of time measurement. Her creative process often revolves around investigating and questioning universally accepted notions of space, time, science, and philosophy, and explores the frequently overlooked relationships between the self and others within contemporary collective life.

All This Has Nothing to Do with Her is an installation that examines the themes of time, cultural dislocation, and identity within the context of the Chinese Diaspora. The work features a series of hairballs collected over a year, each marked with a date, symbolizing personal records of time and memory. The rotating spiral staircase, a structure unique to Western architecture and absent in Chinese culture, represents cultural displacement and the feeling of being out of place. Rusted metal objects, which evoke decay and the passage of time, contrast with the other elements, inviting contemplation on the effects of time and cultural displacement. A video projection of hairball formation adds a dynamic element, emphasizing the cyclical nature of existence and the eternal recurrence of life’s moments. The installation symbolizes the cycle and stagnation of time by juxtaposing physical and virtual realities, creating a dialogue about memory, identity, and belonging in an ever-changing world.

For more insights into her work, you can view the installation view here and the detailed video of hairball formation in this work here.