Guan Xiao

    BIOGRAPHY

    Guan Xiao (b. 1983, Chongqing, China) lives and works in Beijing. Her practice spans sculpture, painting, installation, and video, developing a distinctive visual language through a collage-based approach. Moving across different historical and cultural contexts, it brings together elements of identity, history, regional culture, and everyday experience within a single structure. Unexpected and compelling combinations of materials create tensions through acts of appropriation and collage between histories and cultures, foregrounding the significance of difference. Through contradictions between material and structure, the work seeks new forms of balance, reconsidering the definition of bodily existence and its relationship to time and space in an era increasingly invaded and reshaped by the expansion of information and the elevation of consumption as a cultural ideal.

    Guan Xiao has participated in numerous major biennials and triennials, including the 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2021); the 58th October Salon (Belgrade Biennial) (2021); the 57th Venice Biennale (2017); the 3rd New Museum Triennial (2015); and the 13th Lyon Biennale (2015). She has also held solo exhibitions at institutions including Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2025); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2019); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis (2019); Kunsthalle Winterthur, Winterthur (2018); Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris (2016); and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London (2016). Her work has additionally been exhibited at institutions such as Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong; Long Museum, Shanghai; Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; and Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul.

    Her work is held in the collections of major international institutions, including Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Julia Stoschek Collection; Boros Collection; aimler Collection; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; K11 Art Foundation; Long Museum, Shanghai; New Century Art Foundation, Beijing; East West Bank Collection; Y.D. Collection; M+ Collection, Hong Kong; Octone Foundation; and Tanoto Art Foundation.

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    • 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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