Xinyi Xu
ISSUE 16

Xinyi Xu: language across cultures, time and the instability of meaning
Issue 16

Reviewer: Alastair JR Ball 

  Xinyi Xu’s work begins with a simple proposition: that meaning does not reside in language alone, but in the quiet negotiations between objects, bodies, and memory. What distinguishes her practice is that the most complex experiences, migration, estrangement, belonging, can be rendered legible through things that appear, at first glance, mute. Shells, bones, tools, wires. A vocabulary of the overlooked. Xu, a London-based artist whose life traces a movement from Shenzhen to the UK, works primarily with found objects, assembling them into suspended constellations that hover between sculpture and syntax. As she puts it: “I hope my viewers can feel a sense of connection from my work. The connection of those subtle, fragile links between overlooked objects, between people, and between human and the environment.” This desire for connection is precise, almost forensic. Her works stage the absence of coherence, and then ask: what forms of understanding might still be possible?