Qin Xiaoshi (b.1989, Guangzhou) is an explorer adept at executing compositions with a strong narrative. She captures the passage of time, focusing on the myths of the Pearl River Delta, apocalyptic preparations, and future debates. She depicts marginalized people, landscapes, and histories through multiple mediums, and explores the interactions and interconnections between desire and identity. She graduated from the Visual Arts Department of Columbia University, New York in 2015 and was awarded the Lotus Foundation Award in New York. She now lives in Nansha, Guangdong.
Qin Xiaoshi’s works are characterized by a sense of ease and enjoyment, where nature and human beings merge into one. This “energy” permeates her work, which ranges from performance, video, ceramics, electronic painting, readymade objects, to collage and installation. After returning to China after graduation, she lived in the Pearl River Delta and was attracted by the history of the South China pirates. She likes to hunt for objects, legends, and images in the natural landscape. She wanders between contemporary news, the history of pirate battles, and the legend of the dragon, presenting all these illusions and realities with experimental materials and media. She hides some of these works back into the landscape as a form of exchange.
She works with a variety of traditional and non-traditional materials, such as shells, flagstone, rocks, Plexiglas and steel plates. In some of these materials, there are natural imperfections. Qin Xiaoshi creates her stories around these traces and natural patterns. Flagstone, with its coarse surface and irregular shape, looks like a discarded industrial object, but through Qin’s careful arrangement, takes on a different poetic meaning.
In 2014, Qin Xiaoshi started an art project in New York City, inviting experienced high schoolers to debate topics such as “Will contemporary art exist in 2020?” and “Can AI be an artist?” at the Queens Museum and the Jewish Museum. In 2017, during her residency at Spring Workshop in Hong Kong, Qin Xiaoshi founded the magazine “Ruthless Lights,” where she served as Director of Communications for Miss Ruthless. In the same year, she started the series “Prepare for Doomsday,” in which she reenacted survival strategies and explored how communities can support each other. The series has been exhibited at UCCA Dune, Taikang Space in Beijing, Para Site Art Space in Hong Kong, and Asia Society Hong Kong Center. Her research on sound in public space in collaboration with curator Hera Chan led to a residency in Havana, Cuba in 2019, supported by the Times Art Museum. At Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, Qin created a monument for the voices that warn of the future but are ignored.
