Xuan Liu's installation “Untitled”, in which the artist tries to avoid using materials with strong symbolic meanings, instead stripping the hemp threads from the twine as the main raw material. The presence of wood, resin and rope in the work violently signals the wildness and vitality that has not been domesticated by modernity, rejecting the romanticized “back to nature” narrative. This methodology is in dialogue with Tim Ingold's “The Ecology of Lines” - material is no longer an objectified medium, but a life trajectory that is woven together by mountain survival instincts and physical memory. The material is no longer an objectified medium, but a life trajectory woven by mountain survival instinct and body memory.
Xuan Liu
Untitled, 2024
Flax, metal, plastic, palm, cement
Dimensions variable
© Courtesy of the artist and Atmosphere Space
The artist attempts to metaphorize the aspects of humanity, animality, and divinity within human through this installation. The work explores the complex mentality of humans confronting spiritual dilemmas from these three dimensions, revealing how the synchronicity and interconnectedness of mental breakthroughs are rooted in one another like rhizomes. This dynamic is manifested in the symbiotic relationship and tension-release interplay of materials within the installation.
Installation view of The Rite of Spring, March 8, 2025 - April 20, 2025, Nan Ke Gallery, Shanghai © Courtesy of Nan Ke Gallery, Photographed by Runxin.
Xuan Liu is a Chinese multi-disciplinary artist based in London, Shanghai and Nanchang. She is graduated in2020 from a Master in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL) in London. Liu is a Fine Arts Special Lecturer at UAL since 2020 and an Assistant Lecturer at Jiangxi Science and Technology NormalUniversity, China, since 2016. She co-founded the art project GMF (Glimmer Music Festival) in 2019, after her local music festival in Nanchang (2012-2015).
Xuan Liu's studio work has largely focused on analogue and digitalaudio technologies, sculpture, video, performances and eventproductions. She works individually and collaboratively to explorenotions and concepts of the merging of noumenal experience andfiction, negotiating between the human body's sensory epistemologyand the development of sound technology, contemporary spiritualismand ritual, expanded theatre and improvisation.
