Chen Xiaoyi

ART

Born in 1992 and raised in Sichuan, China, photographer and artist Chen Xiaoyi’s works is connected to an aesthetic that lends a different perspective to her surrounding natural world and background, which draw references to a cohort of Western abstract art and oriental philosophy.

The artists’ latest body of works witnesses a use of photography and printmaking, a consolidation of methods utilized to investigate underneath the surface of articles by simplifying and abstracting. Consequently, this methodology is intended to awaken spiritual awareness and intuition before discovering the representational spirit of what we visually engage with.

In relation to Xiaoyi’s latest series of work entitled “Where we met”, the thought-provoking exhibition investigates the exemplary aesthetics of the moon, which is depicted amid an oversized scale video installation, where, illustrated in eternal motion, her subject matter is exposed. A projection of the process of light is intentionally positioned in interchange with large-scale surfaces that are reflective, which is designed to discover the ideas of endless separation, aggregation, along with the sporadic living of ambiguities. The installation in its entirety stimulates an “orderly state of non-causal relationships” with the aim to accomplish synchronicity within an immediate variable.

“The moon much like an image of eternal strangeness and fascination, bears the allure of wanting to be touched, yet we soon realize that such a feat is impossible” explains the artist. “We can only meet the moon through indirect reflections of it, much like all memories that are never formed by the objects themselves but by the reflection and construction of our own eyes. In a sense, the moon becomes a perceivable psychological entity through a luminous absent. Therefore, the experience becomes a fissure —somewhat of an absence, where life is no longer experienced from a layer of reality, nor is presented as the language that explicitly describes a tangible object.”

A trailblazer in the art field, Chen Xiaoyi was the 2015 recipient of China’s most prestigious photography prize, the Three Shadows Photography Award, and only last year was acknowledged as one of Asia’s 30 Artist under 30 by Forbes magazine. Her innovativeness holds no bounds.