Her Land: Body as a Terrain: Body as a Terrain

Weijue's artistic practice begins with a contradiction. She works with wool felting—a craft socially coded as "feminine"—yet her process is charged with violence: she repeatedly punctures soft wool with barbed needles to compact it into form. This perfectly mirrors the invisible carving of social norms onto the female body, releasing a testimony to the disciplined body and its traumas. She transfigures the public gaze and its desiring projections into the repetitive puncture of soft materials, a gesture that evokes subtle violence while also indexing the artist's own intensive labor.

Deeply rooted in her own bodily experience, Weijue also explores the intersection of digital culture, sexuality, and societal norms by studying how women are often expected to perform in ways that conform to binary, sexualized content. In these images, the female body is no longer an object gazed upon, nor a unified, bounded entity. It gradually transforms into unfamiliar topography: skin becomes surface, folds become valleys, apertures become entrances—the ambiguity that Julia Kristeva attributes to abjection: “it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it — on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger”.

In her latest mixed-media installations, discarded domestic objects evoke the absent body, while a slow process of mineral crystallization—growing from the outside in over geological time—encrusts their surfaces. The works stage the simultaneous repulsion and fascination provoked by things that blur boundaries: that which, in Kristeva's terms, "beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire" and assumes the place once held by the sacred.

The subject, never truly attaining an independent self, is perpetually gazed upon and consumed by the Other—society, the symbolic order, the expectations of others—as an object of desire. The "I" exists only to satisfy the needs of others. To resist being wholly engulfed, the subject performs a radical gesture of self-expulsion: it strips away and discards the contaminated part that caters to the Other—the part that no longer belongs to any authentic self.