Antenna Space is delighted to announce Guan Xiao: Composite Bodies, a solo exhibition by artist Guan Xiao, marking a significant presentation at Antenna Space Shanghai in M50. The exhibition will run from September 12 through October 25, 2026.

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Press Release

The exhibition takes its starting point from a news photograph of a propeller completely encrusted with mussels. Dense colonies of mussels are commonly found clinging to coastal rock faces and vessel hulls, forming intricate, heavy encrustations. Biologists refer to this composite state formed by large aggregations of individuals as the “collective body.” This concept resonates unexpectedly with Guan Xiao’s longstanding use of root wood in her sculptural practice. For Guan Xiao, her practice is never merely the manipulation of a material, but a reflection on the interrelationships among bodies, environments and objects. She tends to approach and handle objects in an anthropomorphic way. Root wood, along with various objects originally belonging to the realms of industry or everyday life, can thus enter the domain of the body through this very lens.

Curves of root wood faithfully record the trajectory of their lives. They are at once a product of nature and the most direct embodiment of abstraction as a formal language. In her previous works, Guan Xiao’s deployment of root wood constituted a protracted struggle—a mutual resistance and counterbalance between them. The morphology, texture, and traces of growth inherent in the material continuously informed the artist’s decisions, while her interventions, appropriations, and reconfigurations simultaneously redefined its original meaning. Through this process, Guan Xiao has become increasingly convinced that root wood shares many structural and gestural affinities with most living organisms: the texture of skin, bulbous skull-like craniums, hollows resembling thoracic cavities, meandering sinews and skeletal frameworks, spread legs and outstretched arms, even shapes suggestive of genitalia. Like living bodies, they stretch and deform, constantly shaped by the forces of their environment. For Guan Xiao, root wood is not merely a natural material—it is, in itself, a body.

In this solo exhibition, Guan Xiao will present new sculptures centred on the theme of the body, alongside paintings that continue to be informed by her sculptural approach. In her painting practice, at the sketching stage, she begins by referencing an image and gradually abstracting it, drawing on Paul Cézanne’s working method by deconstructing the composition, color field, or content through distinct shapes and planes. For the artist, this process is inherently sculptural. She therefore approaches abstract painting through the language of relief, allowing volume, texture, and painterly concerns to interact and generate a distinctive visual vocabulary. This method of translating images into painting through sculptural formal logic resonates conceptually with Guan Xiao’s understanding of environment: that environment is akin to a skin enveloping us.

Works across mediums explore recurring threads within her practice: environment, narrative, and the body. These themes interweave to generate a powerful dramatic tension—one that arises when interconnected yet distinct entities intensify through confrontation and integration, eventually influencing and transforming one another to open up new possibilities. It is this state, generated through composite entanglement and mutual integration, that constitutes the artist’s understanding of the “body.”