Guan Xiao

Guan Xiao sees her art-making as a means to comment on the current image circulation enforced by digitality and globality. In her works, images are taken out of their original context and arranged according to a personal logic, so as to understand what it means to experience images from a global Standpoint. Her triptych video works and sculptural collages study the internal equivalence between object and subject, the old and the new, and the self and the other, from a view point that appears to be counter-intuitive.

Reading (2013)

The dreamy video essay »Reading« consists of two parts: on the left Channel, we see the visual rendition of a group of virtual pillars sliding down the frame from the top to the bottom; the essayistic lines on the right reads these visual materials in six chapters. In this gestural and rhythmic analysis of her artistic composition, the mixing of the visual ornaments from various sources eventually stop the viewers to conceive the possible origin of the visual material. Meanwhile, the subtitle in the right hand side described the message behind these compositions of the virtual objects in detail: repetition, hyperbole, analogy, and so on. Each has specific lines of thought regarding the production of meaning.

Cognitive Shape (2013)

»Cognitive Shape« is the first film of Guan Xiao utilizing a triptych format, weaving various materials selected from her image database into a video essay. The artist has made herself acting as an indexical figure to narrate the cognitive process of seeing. In the video, there are lithic and technological objects descending in a row, or the fatalistic image of snake feeding vis-à-vis a clinical image of MRI scanning, explained with an artist's didactic tone, wearing a futuristic outfit. In such a way, it seems that even contemporary Utilities are infused with the prehistorical totem-liked aura. While her voice speculates on the cognitive condition with and without the conception of language, viewers would find her in later sequences testing her previous conclusion with her ver­bal interpretation, luring the audiences to view in the way she suggests.