YU Xiao

YU Xiao (1)

1. Please introduce yourself, focusing on the theme of your work and your working method. (You do not need to mention your exhibition history, education, or career.)

I am an artist who transforms silent trauma into a language of material resistance. My work centres on the female body, specifically, a minority group of the overlooked experiences of involuntary early menopause in Confucian-influenced societies—using painting not as representation, but as a living body itself. Which is a discursive form of painting.

The methods include Reversal techniques of cutting, folding, and reconfiguring canvases; Cross-cultural intersections bringing together psychoanalytic and the postmodern with traditional Chinese approaches including the Song aesthetics and the qi and xu of Taoism; Effective assemblages: Translating traumatic experiences through material operations (e.g., masking tape balls, red dots)
My method begins with rupture (epistemic rupture between cortical knowledge and visceral knowing): I cut, fold, and reconfigure canvases to expose what painting traditionally hides. The stretcher bars, raw edges, and stained undersides become visceral archives of mourning. These acts—cutting through fabric, crumpling surfaces—mirror the psychological and physiological fractures of bodily loss, turning shame into a generative force.
I bridge ancient Chinese aesthetics and contemporary philosophy: Song Dynasty xu (void) meets Deleuze’s becoming and Lyotard’s figure. Where a Song painter might leave blankness as a space of the literati’s contemplation, I reserve voids that scream quietly. Where Western abstraction seeks purity, I embed chaos—masking tape balls, displaced dots—to disrupt hierarchies. Every gesture is a trans-cultural dialogue, a refusal to let pain be buried.
For me, painting is a site of trans-encounter: a place where the body’s experience and the canvas’s materiality collide, mourn, and ultimately reconfigure freedom.

 

When Slide Up and Down Evokes the Blink No.110. 09, Acrylic and oil paint on canvas and linen, Stained stretcher, previously applied masking tape, Marker pen, 120 x 90 cm, 2024

2. Please describe the work(s) you will showcase at Kiaf SEOUL 2025.

My “Utopia Blink” series orbits the notion of the “non-place”—a realm of potential beyond tangible reality—where “blink” acts as both a lens and a spark: a primal, curious way of seeing that jolts attention awake. Though unmoored from any direct nod to Theodor W. Adorno, the phrase itself crackled with energy, and I’ve chased that spark through assemblage, unravelling how its jolt pried open new ways of making.

Then there’s “Da Vinci’s Mirror,” a quiet excavation of perception, perspective, and the fragile crossroads of reality and abstraction—tangled, too, with Helene Cixous’s écriture féminine. It lingers in the fluidity of representation: images that refuse to fix, shifting like thought itself, all to trace the unspoken currents of female experience.

In both bodies of work, I imagine paintings as living things, breathing from both sides—a Möbius strip of emotion where elegance and rupture coexist, no boundaries. Canvas is sliced with surgical precision; a diagonal gash bares raw linen beneath, murmuring, “Look deeper.” Frames cradle not just what’s seen, but unseen: a sliver of unknown space, borrowed and held. Stretchers hum soft melody, balls of masking tape tuck secrets tight. The Song Dynasty’s aesthetic principle of xu (emptiness) flirts with Lyotard’s “unpresentable”. And the stretcher, that humble “servant” of the painting, steps into the light as a star. Take that, hierarchy.

Da Vinci’s Mirror No.60.10/01, Acrylic on Canvas, stained stretcher, previously applied masking tape, 60 x 80 cm, 2025

3. What is the most distinctive feature of your artwork that sets you apart from other artists?

Three features:
a. Materialisation of affect: Translating psychological mechanisms of mourning into visual symbols as generative force (e.g., balls as ovarian metaphors, cuts as wounds), transforming these figures into a model of autonomous painting. Beyond East/West binaries: I embed Song aesthetics within the canvas’s flesh, creating a dialogue Lyotard might call “the unpresentable in presentation itself.”

b. Enhancing a new Feminist approach to shame via figural painting, rather than reciprocally exchanging experience and representation. Beyond biographical pain: Unlike Frida Kahlo’s symbolic self-portraiture, I abstract trauma into material encounters, where stretchers, balls, and voids become the body.

c. Disrupting painterly hierarchies via cutting/folding, activating the narrative potential of canvas backs and stretchers. Beyond “Destruction Art”: My cuts/folds aren’t nihilistic (like Auto-Destructive Art)—they’re reparative gestures, echoing Taoist transformation: “From rupture, wholeness.”
In essence, I turn painting inside out. The stretcher is no longer a skeleton—it’s a skin. The void isn’t empty—it’s a chorus. The ball isn’t debris—it’s an ovary. This is where mourning becomes revolution.

Gaming of Trio-Monads #23.11, Acrylic on Canvas, 25 x 25 cm, 2023 (1)

4. Being a full-time artist is never easy. What are the biggest challenges you ever faced being an artist, and what keeps you motivated?

The biggest challenge is always in the future. I think I am good at forgetting what obstacles I had, once the challenges are overcome, and I move on, and keep forward-looking, and always aware that challenges are never absent, be prepared for them. This process creates my own distinct experience and builds refreshed perception to enhance artistic sensibility and sensitivity, which is always exciting.

What keeps me motivated? There are many things. One that fascinates me is the “Dot Conspiracy” that developed last year. Those tiny red dots on gallery price tags? To me, they represent rebellious undercover agents. It adds an element of fun, reminiscent of the renowned painter Zhang Sengyao’s wisdom about “drawing a dragon and dotting its eyes” during the Wei, Jin, Southern, and Northern Dynasties. By painting the dragon’s eyes, he made it come alive. Here, the red dot makes the painting come alive. It encounters the ball, each dot seems to whisper, “This ball of tape cost HOW much?!” and so forth.
Making always brings some unexpected sparks, which are like a fueled engine to keep your energy up, which triggers the revolution and curiosity. What’s more, my studio has this magical vibe (anyone who has been to my studio knows that) —one that radiates rich emotional energy for work, and once you step in, it’ll hold you tight, like you just can’t pull away.

Gaming of Trio-Monads #23.11, Acrylic on Canvas, 25 x 25 cm, 2023 (2)

5. Do you have any future goals as an artist, and if so, what are they, and what subjects or materials are you currently interested in?

The goal is always guided by the flow of practice and the questions that emerge during progress. For example, how do certain artistic and literary discoveries integrate into a presentational assemblage in painting? How does my painting model evolve, shifting the narrative without succumbing to essentialism? More specifically, I dream of creating immersive installations, a “Transcultural Womb” where paintings escape the wall entirely, if I can get a commission to make this. Another proposal is turning galleries into spaces where silence is ritualised, I title it ‘Shame is quiet nature’. A detailed proposal for each is available.
Conveying silence through elegant violence and gentle resistance enriches a new feminist approach to reversing shame through figurative painting, which is the focus of my ongoing work.

Gaming of Trio-Monads #23.11, Acrylic on Canvas, 25 x 25 cm, 2023 (3)

6. What kind of feelings, thoughts, or impressions do you hope to pass on to the audience through 2025 Kiaf HIGHLIGHTS?

The feelings may bring out some key words like: Playfulness, quirkiness, peeping, transgression, elegant violence, irreverence, reversal, a body of reclaimed stigma.
My work may evoke tactile haunting. I expect viewers to stand before a slashed painting and feel their own skin prickle, as if the cut mirrors a scar they carry. That visceral jolt? It’s the silent language of bodies that have been disciplined, hidden, or broken by social norms. This is how early menopause’s shame becomes shared flesh. Moreover, the ball-dot conspiracy invites curiosity as a form of rebellion. That crimson dot winks, while the crumpled tape ball dares you to ask, “What IS this?” These tiny rebels disrupt conventional art-viewing, serving as provocateurs of wonder. The dot acts like a punctuation mark, saying, “Pause here. What’s left unspoken?” The ball—a sticky, glittering remnant of studio labour (perhaps part ovary, part debris)—challenges you to find beauty in the “imperfect.” Together, they transform stigma into magnetic strangeness. It becomes a dazzling event, a delightful surprise. Lean in closer. The gap between the canvases is not empty—it has a life of its own. In the exposed stretchers and the raw linen voids, I want viewers to see their own uncharted absences: a career path set aside for family, a grief tucked away neatly, a dream labelled as “unrealistic.” This concept echoes the Song Dynasty’s notion of “xu,” reinterpreted in a contemporary way: an emptiness that resonates with every “I’m fine” held back.

YU Xiao (2)

7. Please feel free to leave more comments you would like to share with the audience.

Your silence has texture,
Your pain can hold light,
Your voids are landscapes waiting to be mapped,
Reconfiguration occurs.

 

The works of the 10 selected semi-finalists will be featured at each gallery’s booth on site.