Guan Xiao

    BIOGRAPHY

    Guan Xiao, born in 1983, currently works and lives in Beijing. The art practice of Guan Xiao mainly focuses on sculpture, video and installations. She uses her own identity, history and geographical background as material, to collage with the increasingly converging world conditions in the current high-speed decomposition, attempts to emphasize the importance of differences by creating direct or tactful contradiction; And to express her understanding of the importance of differences through various themes.

    She graduated from the Communication University of China. Her work has been featured in the 15th Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah (2021, upcoming) ; the 34th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo (2021, upcoming); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen (2020); Antenna Space, Shanghai (solo; 2020, 2015); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (solo; 2019); Honolulu Biennial, O‘ahu (2019); Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (solo; 2019); Migros Museum, Zürich (2019); Kunsthalle Winterthur, Winterthur (solo; 2018); High Line, New York (2017); the 57th Venice Biennale, Venice (2017); M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (2017); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (solo; 2017, 2014); 9th Berlin Biennale, Berlin (2016); the K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai (solo; 2016); ICA, London (solo; 2016); CAPC musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux (solo; 2016); Jeu de Paume, Paris (solo; 2016); Long Museum (West Bund), Shanghai (2015); the 13th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon (2015); 2015 New Museum Triennial, New York (2015); Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna (2015); 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, Shenzhen (2012) and National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (2007). Her work is in the collections of Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; M+ Collection, Hong Kong; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland; Boros Collection, Berlin, Germany; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA; New Century Art Foundation, Beijing, China among others.

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    EXHIBITIONS

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    ARTICLES

    • Rhythm Of Singularity | Lai Fei

       
      To be honest, I don’t know how Guan Xiao does it. Looking at the ways she grabs and synthesizes materials in her work, it’s a bit like watching a contestant on The Brain1 microscopically examining a thousand goldfish. This isn’t a totally apt analogy, for today it’s nearly impossible to quantify—and to describe, even—just how much visual information we receive on a daily basis, via networks both visible and intangible. In this imploding society, everyone is caught in the constant flow of data, always susceptible to some form of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. What makes Guan’s work unique is her ability to maintain an extremely high level of concentration while pulling content and motifs from the massive material bank of the internet. In her process, she stays true to an internal worldview that is neither culturally specific nor general. In this dazzling world of data, she finds her own “basic logic” to connect forms.

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    • Everyday Transformations: Guan Xiao | Ying Tan

       
      “In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora (I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities)”—Ovid, Metamorphoses

       

      Ovid opens the Metamorphoses (AD 8) with an explicit statement of intent. In the 250 myths that follow, the Roman poet chronicles the subject of transformation—sometimes in an arbitrary fashion, sometimes retelling well-known Greek fables, and sometimes straying in other, unexpected directions. One of these stories, which entered our collective consciousness, can be seen at Rome’s Galleria Borghese, where Giovanni Bernini’s famous sculpture tells the tale of the nymph Daphne in mid-metamor­phosis—her limbs turning into the twines of a laurel tree as she escapes from the love-stricken Apollo. Transformations occur in our everyday lives, too; we experience this in cinema, as film scores transport audiences sonically through visual imagery…

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    • Be Here, Now: An Introduction to an Introduction | Stephanie Bailey

       

      “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

      —Rumi

       
      In autumn, 2000, New Literary History published an issue asking if there was life after identity politics, to which Marlon B. Ross responded: “Which ‘identity?’ What ‘politics?’ ‘After’ when and where?” Ross’s point was this: Before “identity politics” there was already a politics of identity—and “wherever there is identity, there is a struggle for power.” In the same issue, Eric Lott located this struggle within a “politics of participatory discrepancy,” created when emergent social movements collide and collude to form a dissonant social fabric composed of rampant intersections and interactions between groups. It is in this fabric that Lott located a potential for a unified, anti-normative politics, in which no one is represented by one movement, and no movement is expected to represent the entirety of a human being.

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