CHAPTER 6 is honored to present the solo exhibition of artist Dong Jinling: Burst Through Milk And Blood. Beneath the intricate fabric of contemporary society flows an invisible river, formed by the confluence of milk and blood. Along its banks stand bodies disciplined and regulated by systems of control. Through the clue of the productive body, artist Dong Jinling reveals the often-overlooked or concealed politics of the body within today’s systems of social production. This exhibition presents two of the artist’s series, Workers and River, juxtaposed within the space to construct a contemporary allegory of production, reproduction, and the body through a dynamic dialogue.

Workers is an ongoing artistic practice that Dong Jinling initiated in October 2023. Beyond her work as an artist, she participates in productive labor as a labor. In each monthly cycle of labor, the artist uses her wages to commission the casting of a standardized female closed pelvic sculpture. Each sculpture is inscribed with numerical details: the labor date, income earned, and production cost. The interplay of cold numerical data, repetitive sculptures, and the standardized pelvis encapsulates Dong Jinling’s three intersecting identities: worker, artist, and woman. This exhibition does not mark the conclusion of the series; for Dong, as long as her identity remains unchanged and her labor continues, the series will persist.

While the Workers series reflects the artist’s daily engagement with productive labor, her new series River response at the hopes and resistance of her earlier work, Dong Jinling. The ‘River’ symbolizes both the grooves formed by flowing milk and the morphology of the female reproductive system. The term ‘burst’ simultaneously refers to the fractured state of the body and the potential for breakthrough and resistance. Dairy cows are reduced to milk-producing machines, their suffering obscured behind pastoral imagery on milk cartons. Meanwhile, women’s reproductive functions are framed within the medical gaze and systems of population control, with the pelvis becoming a site of disciplinary power. Not only is labor alienated, but even the most fundamental biological functions—nursing and reproduction—are transformed into resources to meet systemic demands. In this exhibition, overproduced breasts and pelvises marked with the financial data of labor together form a silent political study of the body. Perhaps through art, we can pierce this surface that encodes the individual life into the logic of efficiency and outcomes, exposing the normalized traces of violence inscribed beneath.

'Burst Through Milk And Blood' does not simply use dairy cows as a metaphor for the human condition. By paralleling two bodies—both alienated and disciplined—it avoids the trap of anthropocentrism, instead presenting an ethical concern for the equality of all living beings.