Xinhui Xu was born in Shanghai, China. She studied BA Interior Design at Donghua University, China, and she is currently completing MA Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art, London.
Xinhui is a former interior designer and now an artist working with performance, oral histories and photography.
Xinhui Xu employs dialogical processes that unfold slices of daily life as a narrative method. Interviews, documentary objects and oral histories come together in a form that follows the logic of the project to tell stories by the stories themselves. She performs and embodies others’ stories in order to pull their hidden value into the visual world and amplify the voices of their authors.
Her practice aims to look beyond social labels and focus on others’ lived experience. In her most recent work She's Corrected, Xinhui starts directly from women's real experiences of self-objectification and visualises the oppression of women within patriarchy. When what you see is no longer those general and distant classifications and descriptions, but existence composed of lived experience, would that make a difference?
Daily objects, oral histories and embodiment of experience are tools she respects and cherishes. Documenting the life histories of ordinary individuals, Xinhui intends to communicate the complex relationship between individual encounters and social structures. She believes these fragments are keys to breaking the binary opposition between grand history and everyday life.
‘Level of existence where events are not at all the large scale, momentous events of History, but the small scale, trivial, forgettable acts of bodily survival and self-maintenance.’
Flaudette May V. Datuin
Under patriarchy women are valued as objects to be viewed and evaluated. This leads women to internalise a third-person (observer) perspective (e.g., ‘how do I look?’) rather than focus on their needs relating to the unobservable self from a first-person perspective (e.g., ‘what can I do?’ or ‘how do I feel?’). This observer’s perspective requires women to watch or monitor their behaviour and even thoughts, on a long-term basis.
It is of concern that we live in an environment which glorifies the objectification of women, as bringing value or reward to women. In subscribing to this self-surveillance, we (women) are constantly revising our true wants and needs, denying the desires of the ego. This means we repress our own subjectivity with patriarchal standards. In a repetitive cycle of self-correction and repression, our subjectivity is constantly weakened and we lose the ability to express our own voice.
An outcome of the project takes the form of a video in which the artist applies correction fluid directly to her face as a metaphor for this process of so-called ‘correction’. Xinhui's body performs to camera, implicating the viewer in a phenomenological situation in which the experiences of eleven other women are shared publicly and therefore given agency. In visualising the act of ’self-correcting‘ Xinhui makes explicit the harm inflicted upon the women in the process of self-surveillance. In temporarily depriving herself of sight and speech during the performance, Xinhui draws attention to the latent power within such acts of seeing and speaking.
Another outcome takes the form of a publication in which eleven women’s experiences of self-objectification are documented. It contains real dialogues transcribed from interviews, alongside corresponding objects. Each testimony reveals a woman’s self-censorship and makes visible her own erasure.
The full oral histories of each of the women presented in the video are included in the publication.
In London, the history of living on boats dates back to the 1760s; but today, the boaters’ position within the nation state or compared to their sedentary neighbours is still uncertain or liminal. Currently, attempts to further reduce the mooring space on London's waterways have pointed to the problem again.
Although boaters use the emergent features of their choice of dwelling as a way of creatively experimenting with their mode of being in the world, and of creating what they see as a better, or even Utopian, way of living and interacting, they were labeled variously good or bad by outsiders. This unfixed view of the boaters — moving between disinterest and fascination, demonization and romanticization, respect and violence — can take its toll on the itinerant population. Most importantly, I believe, each of these broad labels misunderstands the central and most important descriptor of the boaters, namely that they are alive people who have a vivid life and treasured family. These boats are neither a weird space nor simple vehicles, they are somebody’s home.
Space is transformed into a home through the familiarity accumulated by daily routines and countless trivial things. Xinhui invited boaters to draw a map of the home based on their memories, and during the drawing process, dictate the history of their home. She then abstracted a collective trace which constitutes the making and remaking of the home in relation to their memory and the daily life that indeed happened on it.
The past and the present interweave on this trace. And it is transformed into a corresponding mooring pin to visualise the relationship between their home and the boats' mooring space.
At the same time, Xinhui documented boaters' objects and furniture through photography and recorded their oral histories. She did so in order to capture the memories of home and make them tangible, inviting the audience to build this home and establish a spiritual meeting with it, in the process of listening and watching. Not seeing a widely marked disparate group as an outsider but from the perspective of alive people and their living place which is similar to all of us. Then to rethink whether their right to live here should be relinquished.
Some chairs in the artist’s community attracted her attention. They look like the most common chairs in every family, but they have been abandoned outside. They are old and shabby, ordinary, and seemed useless. There are lots of such chairs in many communities which built up for twenty or more years. They seem to represent a kind of absence and death. She photographed these chairs from morning to night, trying to figure out why they were outside and what happened to them.
