Vanguard Gallery is pleased to present “The Stone Begins to Talk”, the second solo show by Hu Jiayi with the gallery. Opening on 12 September, the exhibition brings together her recent video works “The Red Room” and “The Last War”, alongside a selection of works on paper and prints from the same series. “The Stone Begins to Talk” continues a motif from Hu Jiayi’s previous solo project at Vanguard Gallery, the extensive use of deep vermilion divides the exhibition space into different open rooms, where discontinuous temporalities unfold, drawing audiences into the narrative flow woven through Hu’s bodily expressions.

As a multimedia artist, Hu Jiayi’s practice spinning across performance, experimental video, photography, installation, and painting, with video works that developed from the documentation of her performances occupying a central position. Her performances often carry a ritualistic undertone. She often uses the body as a medium, establishing a sensory resonance with the viewer through a sustained exploration of her own perceptual experiences, while re-examining the relationships and tensions between time and life, society and the body in everyday experience.

The title The Stone Begins to Talk derives from Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. In the play, Mother Courage, who survives by selling goods while following the army, loses all three of her children to war. Among them, her youngest daughter Kattrin is the most innocent and courageous one. Unable to speak, Kattrin remains silent throughout the play, like a stone. Yet on the night when danger approaches, she climbs onto a rooftop and beats a drum to warn the entire town. Discovered by the enemy soldiers, she is shot dead.

The The Red Room series comprises performance, multi-channel video, and Polaroid photographs. In the videos, Hu rises and falls in rhythm with the ticking of a clock, imitating the fall of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, in a counterclockwise motion; walks and runs repeatedly within a confined space; traces the marks of her hands across her face while covering it; or allows her body to gradually form abstract shapes within layers of clothing. These seemingly compulsive acts of repetition are the result of the artist’s continual deliberation and arrangement against the persistent ticking of the clock. In this process, bodily intuition is transformed into a tangible manifestation of the pressures of time, spatial tensions, psychological emotions, and states of consciousness.

Meanwhile, The Last War consists of performance-based video works and black-and-white photographic prints produced through photogram techniques. Red light, an essential condition of the traditional darkroom, suffuses the room in which Hu performs, while the color red carries various symbolic meanings in human societies: war, blood, sacrifice, celebration, and more. As the boundaries between media loosen, performance, moving images, and photographic images overlap and transform within the darkroom, generating unexpected visual forms in this series.

In the introduction to Scene 11 of Mother Courage and Her Children, Bertolt Brecht uses the metaphor of the stone beginning to speak to describe how a person deprived of language expresses a warning through the sacrifice of the body. Here, the disappearance of words resonates with the silence present in Hu Jiayi’s performances. Yet the absence of language does not diminish expression; rather, it strips away its artificiality, revealing the most instinctive connection between bodily gestures, emotions, and the human spirit. Through her practice, the body, shaped by social conventions, cultural identities, and the gaze of others, regains its agency as a form of expression.