Artist

Guan Xiao

Born in Chongqing, 1983 and lives in Beijing, China

Guan Xiao’s practice extends across various media, notably sculpture, installation, and video. In her works, “cognition” serves as a key concept, referring to the process of generating or acquiring knowledge via perception, judgment, imagination, reasoning, and concept formation. This process can be conscious or unconscious, concrete or abstract, as well as intuitive or conceptual.
The materials Guan Xiao chooses to work with are consequences of personal experience and contingency, including ready-mades and artefacts which she encounters in daily life and in her cognitive processes, as well as images obtained via the internet and other media. These materials signify various issues related to culture, technology, materiality, and power in contemporary reality. In her sculptures and installations, the artist magnifies the idiosyncrasies of the materials with her unique visual language, and transforms them into experimental objects of observation. At the same time, she fuses and contextualizes these objects and establishes among them abstract relations, even jumps in relations. Through this cognitive experiment, her thoughts and logics gain physical forms and embody a rich visual aesthetics.
Guan Xiao’s video works open up to more specific discussions on issues related to cognition. Her references and attitude are conveyed through streams of images, and reveal themselves as the processual logics of the cognitive self.

Exhibitions
Exhibitions
Art in the Age of Anxiety
Curated by Omar Kholeif, this is the most ambitious exhibition to date in the region exploring art in the age of the internet. The exhibition takes place in Gallery 1,2 and 3.
21 Mar 2020 - 21 Jun 2020
Sharjah Art Foundation
Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi
Exhibitions
Guan Xiao: Flattened Metal
Working mainly in sculpture and video, Chinese artist Guan Xiao (b.1983) explores how ways of seeing...
20 Apr 2016 - 19 Jun 2016
London
Exhibitions
Guan Xiao: Elastic Sleep
The K11 Art Foundation and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London present “Guan Xiao: Elastic Sleep” the...
25 Oct 2016 - 30 Nov 2016
chi K11 art museum
Shanghai
Exhibitions
Guan Xiao: Living Sci-Fi, Under the red stars
Beijing-based artist Guan Xiao (b. 1983 in Chongqing, China) is having her second solo show with the...
28 Apr 2017 - 01 Jul 2017
Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler
Berlin
Exhibitions
Mutations
An open-air exhibition which deals with the relationship between man and nature, investigating the boundaries...
20 Apr 2017 - 30 Mar 2018
New York
Exhibitions
Kollectors Series: Media in Motion
K11 Art Foundation presents Media in Motion as the second exhibition in its Kollectors Series, which...
17 Jan 2019 - 07 Apr 2019
chi art space – K11 Art Foundation
Hong Kong
Art Spaces
Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler
Galleries in Berlin
Antenna Space
Galleries in Shanghai
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