The feminine, as Jingyi Zhang’s Between Her and the Other (2025) suggests, is an embodied manifestation of both personal experience and social construction. The work engages with how social pressure imposes on women not only physical but also performative demands, which in turn generate identitarian instability and vulnerability, often impinging upon a woman’s perception of the self. In this video, two digitally generated female figures are each associated with the marine and urban landscapes they inhabit in order to explore the notion of duality. As a result, identity is conceptually rendered as the negotiation of opposites: on the one hand, a fixed and socially construed persona which becomes internalised; on the other hand, an individually determined psychological and bodily domain.
In terms of visual narrative, the blue, crystal-clear surface and depth of the sea stand for self-determination, whereas the vibrant, multichromatic palette and diversity of architectural forms that characterise the urban environment stand for the social conventions, aesthetic expectations, and public visibility that shape a woman’s identity according to externally established paradigms. Yet, as Between Her and the Other unfolds, duality gives way to continuity. In fact, except for the diametrically opposite colours of their dresses, the two protagonists are identical, suggesting that they are twins. Moreover, their interactions, such as running towards each other or holding hands, symbolically both enact the psychological dynamic of looking at oneself through another’s eyes and point to the ongoing process through which a woman observes her own body as if she were another person.
In the very moment in which the spectator realises that the twins stand for the simultaneity of self and other, the notion of continuity merges with that of unity. This is reinforced as one reaches the second half of the video, in the sequences in which the protagonists destabilise the fundamental principles of their identitarian profiles by abandoning their respective habitats to join the other, either in the depths of the sea or in the streets of a spectral city. The act of encounter is emblematic. The dynamic of coming into contact becomes a metaphor for subjectivity as produced through the inevitable negotiation between self-perception and external conditioning. It resonates with the Lacanian structure of the ‘mirror image’, even though it foregrounds identification rather than misrecognition as the modality through which the self is defined in the perception of an image of the other.
Lacan’s category pervades Between Her and the Other in more ways than one. In this work, the social sphere is the external world reflected in the mirror: a world not completely separated from the self, and an undeniable factor through which a woman’s relation to herself is constantly mediated. Societal constructs of femininity are not merely opposite or external counterparts of a woman’s self; they are the medium through which her individuality and sovereign bodily awareness become apparent, and ultimately, non-negotiable, as she navigates the complex process of self-discovery.
