The works of artist Zhang Xinjun are clearly narrative in nature. Rather than analytically breaking down his work into its various elements, we need to find the inner clue of his narrative in order to understand the complex imagery behind the realistic objects. The key to interpretation that Zhang Xinjun offers us is the feeling, comprehension and presence of the living body, which mediates his understanding of the real world to us. In this respect, what is presented in Mine is not an object made of earth and straw and wooden boards, but a space in which reality and the body coexist.

Zhang Xinjun specialises in associating the body with the elements of the earth, as in his works Mine and Wheat. In Mine, Zhang Xinjun uses the movements of his limbs to shape the clay, and the work serves as a mark of the body's negative space on the one hand, and the reality of the present space on the other, expressing the dialectic between reality and the body: the body lives on the earth and leaves its traces, while reality is presented precisely through the body's activities.

This self-consciousness of the body forms the core language of Zhang Xinjun's works, and distills in them almost the entire philosophical flow from modern to contemporary times - the world is the world of the self as a subject, and the self should be an embodied existence, and the world is modeled and transformed through our somatic experience.

In Wheat, for example, Zhang Xinjun transforms a bedpan he once used into the form of wheat. There is no conceptual connection between the bedpan and the wheat, but in Wheat, the boundaries between objects are broken and fused through the work of the body. There is an original interaction between the bedpan and the body, which is now transformed into grains of wheat through the artistic process, and the interaction between the body and reality is formatively expressed; this transformation of the object, which began in 2017 and will continue, expresses the ever-changing nature of the world and the multiplicity of physical experiences, so that artistic expression is not confined to the shackles of the object.

If the works as installations present the mediated nature of the body in representing the real world, Zhang Xinjun's paintings present the subjectivity of the body. In the works Cotton White, Blooming and Refugee, Zhang Xinjun uses symbolism to express the sacks in his paintings as a notion of the boundaries of human interaction with reality, the realistic expression in the images abstracted into various imagery through somatic experience. For Zhang Xinjun, it is not unwarranted imagination, or a mysterious play on words that connects the objects, but rather it is his somatic experience as the subject that determines the meaning of the imagery. The torn sack is imagined as a tattered garment or a broken building, both as an expression of his own experience of temperature and interaction with the outside world.

In Refugee, how does the somatic element allow the viewer to associate the soil blocks with imagery of human? Perhaps it is the tactile residue of walking barefoot on the earth, perhaps it is the childhood joy of squeezing mud with one's hands, perhaps it is a field of wheat where people have left their sweat, perhaps it is the resting place of a departed life. The many possible experiences allow the soil block to transcend the object and become a person. This body-led narrative moves away from the semiotic sense of rigid referential or exemplary relations, thus asserting that the interpretation of the world will have infinite possibilities because of its association with the body.

Finally, as Heidegger said, human as Dasein is to exist in the world, and in this process sometimes inevitably lives an unauthentic life. Art is a path to return to our true nature, and this is what makes Zhang Xinjun's artwork so moving. His works are always associated with the earth, minerals, food and temperature through the body, the simple and profound expression in his work that contrasts with the present time when the senses are paralyzed by dazzling commodities and technology - where people are taken out of the earth and become slaves to symbols through symbols. This is a stark contrast that gives his works an aesthetic quality of regressing to the true.

The Leib (living body) is the path to reality, and Zhang Xinjun not only uses his somatic experience to portray his perception of the real world, but also extends this path to a farther artistic utopia. Reality may be as mundane as mud and linen, and this superficial ordinariness may not as eye-catching as the gorgeous neon lights at first glance, and thus temporarily overshadowed by the hustle and bustle of the times, but the thickness and richness of reality that have settled down will eventually be sublimated in art, allowing people to dwell poetically on the earth.