Resembling windows, tent and bricks, Xin Zhang’s artworks sit on the theme of urban alienation and migration, asking how home is built, unbuilt and remembered across cities, materials and body. Born on the south coast of China and now living in London, Xin looks back at the shifts between cities to confront origins and identity in their barest form.
Refusing to be grounded by categories, Xin is constantly looking for new language and form. Her design background and trainings in traditional printing at the Royal College of Art laid the ground work for her interdisciplinary practice across printmaking, photography and installation. Fueled by extreme tenderness and passion, it drifts in the in-between and leads us through the limbo of self-recognition.
Under the Roof of an Alienated City
In one of her latest work Insomnia I (2025), where a twisted view of the city floats before a window of light, Xin commented on the alienation of metropolitan life. The photograph conjures a real yet surreal and detached location, gesturing towards a sense of placelessness——an anonymous space of in transit, as described by Marc Auge’s.
The eccentric line ‘where to look under this temporary roof’ is threaded between the layers. Such text recurs across her work as either a narrative, a critique or a confession, offering a glimpse into Xin’s method of working where writing and making feed into one another.
As is looking through a window, Insomnia I articulates urban alienation while opening a space for self-reflection and recognition.
The Gentle Aching of Home
While she remains critical towards the definition of home, Xin’s tender telling of memory and trauma surfaces in Growing Pain(2025) and Of Eros of Dust(2023).
In Growing Pain(2025), columns of brick-like cubics carry grids, stains and handwriting, weightlessly floating and cut into the air. The papery material mimics the shape of the actual brick yet poetically contradicts its concrete heaviness that suggests vulnerability of body. Set against an actual brick wall, the doubling of the image and the object is deliberate: the actual structure and its representation occupy the same visual space but never quite meet.
Deeply personal, Growing pain dirssects into the East-Asian family value and its emphasis on discipline and self-scarifice——what is being socially produced? Carried by metaphor of ‘brick as body’, the work earns its clarity through an well restraint argument on modern alienation, and the desire to rebuild otherwise.
Mix medium, variable size
Originally presented as a half-burned tent on a pile of charred wood and ash, with a flaming red print telling a personal story of love and destruction, Of Eros of Dust(2023) took on a new life in the garden of a traditional hanok in Seoul, installed for the exhibition The Stone We Hold curated by 13B Gallery.
“ Me and Sangwon and Eunwoo (founders and curators of 13B) spent so much time discussing what’s the best way to install the work over email. We all agreed that we wanted it to evolve from the previous installation and interact with the new context,” Xin shares the story behind.
It now sits quietly in the clearing, a log and the remnants of a bonfire at its side. Unlike its first appearance it expresses longing in a calmer yet firm manner, signaling an evolution in the artist’s own state.
The piece takes on a different perspective on the relationship between self and origin when compared with Insomnia I, which expressed a need of stability, Of Eros of Dust suggests a nomadic and free-spirited view, and a active state of being on the road with no need of permanent structure.
Across the Borders, the Ongoing Quest
Xin’s resent body of work reflects a continuous quest for identity within the them of global migration. She says London has opened a new perspective for her to doubt and question, to search and conclude, while keeping the past in view. What emerges is her rebellion against received structure, articulated in a precise and poetic language, Xin reminded us of how can be call Home.
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