In the ongoing exploration of identity and memory in contemporary art, Jialin Wu’s work functions like a precise surgical knife, dissecting the complex interplay between the individual and history, perception and reality. Wu’s artistic practice is permeated by a meticulous, almost geological-like exploration—an exploration of our own position within the vast network of time, memory, and existence.
Unfixed Coordinates (2025) is one of the works created by Wu in 2025. Through the precise interweaving of four sets of dynamic image sequences and layered soundscapes, this artwork piece liberates historical objects from static archives, transforming them into floating ‘coordinates’—inviting audiences to navigate through fragments of time, space, matter, and perception, questioning the certainty of individual and collectivist positions. At the core of this installation lies its radical destabilisation. Historical objects—those silent remnants we habitually regard as cultural landmarks—are forcibly dislodged from their fixed bases by Wu. They drift, blur, and interpenetrate, forming a continuous, unstable hum through the intertwining layers of imagery and sound. They become shifting reference points, forcing the audience to hover in the gaps between ‘the known’ and ‘the unknown’, ‘the past’ and ‘the present’, ‘the self’ and ‘the other.’
This state resonates with anthropologist Victor Turner’s theory of the rite of passage, in which the liminal phase renders identity fluid, unresolved, and therefore primed for transformation. The work itself functions as an expansive threshold, a suspended zone of meaning wherein the habitual coordinates of certainty are stripped away. Within this space, identity—whether individual or collective—no longer operates as a retraceable or stable point of origin. Turner’s articulation of the ritual middle state, the neither-nor condition of suspended becoming, is deftly transfigured by Wu into a sensorial field: an immersive interplay of the visual, the sonic, and the spatial.
Within the spatial field of Unfixed Coordinates (2025), identity is articulated as a continuous process of repositioning—a dynamic negotiation calibrated through the echoes of residual history. What Wu engages with is not experiential recollection but the spectral trace of history. The co-existence of multiple video sequences within the installation forms a kind of visual polyphony, one that vocally dismantles the authority of singular historical narrative and fixed identity. Each unfixed coordinate becomes a point of divergence, a strategic deviation from hegemonic structures of remembrance.
Looking back at Wu’s 2024 work Eternal Trace 2, it already foreshadowed the inevitability of this conceptual shift. The piece focuses on the contradictory perceptions of humanity’s position and environmental impact under the conditions of the Anthropocene. Its quiet yet persistent interrogation of perceptual patterns serves as a conceptual prelude to Unfixed Coordinates (2025), where Wu’s focus pivots toward the instability of identity as a set of shifting coordinates. Both works disclose her sustained engagement with the core thematic concern of positionality.
Although Eternal Trace 2 (2024) is anchored in relatively linear, single-channel narrative and framed within broad ecological discourse, Unfixed Coordinates (2025) signals a methodological and conceptual departure. Wu transitions into spatial environments composed of multi-channel imagery and immersive soundscapes, shifting her attention from planetary-scale anxieties to the subtle architectures of identity, memory, and cultural symbolism. This movement does not abandon her earlier concerns; rather, it intensifies them through a more intricate and affective vocabulary.
In Unfixed Coordinates (2025), Wu undertakes what might be described as an ongoing archaeology of memory. Identity, in this work piece, is no longer a fixed essence; it is a contingent formation—uncertain, continually shaped in the recursive tension between acts of remembering and acts of reconstruction. Through the medium of moving image, Wu excavates, cleanses, and reconfigures buried cultural strata. As the work reverberates between fragment and formation, between echo and reconstruction, Wu’s practice offers no resolution. Instead, it invites us to remain within the threshold—where the coordinates of identity resist fixation, and where the act of becoming remains, always, unfinished.
