Kexin Xiao
About
Illustration
SERIES ILLUSTRATION
Tropical Memory
ZINE & INSTALLATION
Artificial Longevity
PICTURE BOOK
The Death Museum
ANIMATION
Study， like a thief
INSTALLATION
The False Eye
VIDEO & INSTALLATION
Invalid Accompany
OTHER WORK
SKETCH
Tropical Memory
2021
I lived in Xishuangbanna for almost twenty years, and I hated the heat of my hometown in high school and wanted to escape so badly. When I left my hometown, I started to miss this particular tropical. This project is an attempt to convey my mixed feelings about my hometown.
I found that most people who live in the tropics are accustomed to tropical features, so they look at it from a tourist's perspective when they think back. For example, elephants and peacocks, which I don't often contact, seem very representative. It's like a false memory implanted by a tourism promotion ad. Instead, their own emotional experiences are ignored by themselves. They think about them after being reminded—for example, the joy of eating fruits, the disgust of hot weather, and so on.
So, after researching, I thought that to express the real tropical memories, we should let the tropical features become the backdrop and let the "feeling" of living become the object of expression.
This project is an attempt to convey my mixed feelings about my hometown.
Artificial Longevity
2024
This project is a Jenga game, which simulates the process of gaining and losing in life through stacking and losing wooden blocks. Through the game, I want to prompt participants to think about what they are most unwilling to lose in the later stages of their lives, as well as the price they can bear in order to win the chance to live and the extent of survival they can endure. I hope that everyone can have such a "breakpoint discussion" in advance for the sunset that will eventually come in life.
The Death Museum
2022
This project is about that - some thoughts on death and how to cope with it. When I saw the bow that appeared in the news reports after the crash of MU5735, I was saddened to suddenly realise that without realising it, we had been through a lot of deaths. It was as if I knew about death naturally. But is this right? How does everyone else feel about death? How long do we grieve over death?
In the design of the museum, the ground floor belongs to the "strangers", perhaps the "sufferers" we have seen on television, whose regrets and sorrows we empathise with.
On the second floor, perhaps, are friends unrelated to us, such as pets. The third floor is family members, such as grandfather.
The picture book unfolds with the death of Grandpa, describing the process of Little girl collecting the fan in the museum. Death is sad, but sadness is fallible. We perceive the pain of different deaths differently, just as a museum has floors high and low.
We all have strong healing powers and will hold all of our love and memories of the deceased in the museum.
Study, like a thief
2022
China has a unique dormitory culture. Most of the roommates are not chosen by themselves but are assigned directly by the school. Roommates thus become a new concept, different from friends and from ordinary classmates. I often felt a hidden pressure to socialise with my roommates. The lounge sometimes became an exhausting social place where we were unable to vent our emotions, leading to internal conflict.
Materials: acrylic pastel watercolour
The False Eye
2021
One day, my three-year-old niece asked me, "Auntie, you are so fat, why do you wear earrings?"
I was speechless and shocked - why does a three-year-old kid start to judge fatness as unattractive? Can't fat people have the same right to pursue beauty as thin people?
I am also one of those who have been kidnapped by popular aesthetics.
It is as if everyone lives in the eyes of falsehood. People see things in a cloak of social values, and forgets about self and the real.
Social scales
Fat illusion
An eye that can only see flaws
Invalid Accompany
2022
This project focuses on describing children who accompany the elderly but are absent-minded. They seem to be there for the elderly, but in reality, they lack real care and always revolve around their own lives.
My vision is to make an installation where the older person is in the centre, sta- tionary and always looking out of the window in the direction of the sunset, showing the older person's sadness at their late age. The children surround the elderly, making a rotatable device to represent their busy personal lives and mental separation from the elderly.
This issue is related to the current model of ageing, and I would like to explore what needs to be done to improve family ageing in modern society and per- haps try to resort to more scientific methods of ageing and ask for social sup- port when the children are unable to do so.
size:50cm x 50cm x 30cm
Materials:stone modeling clay, acrylic, digital, cardboard, acrylic board
Other Work
2023-2024
1. Grandmother
Zine
Size: 20cm x 20 cm
Size: 20cm x 20 cm
Series illustrations
Size: 10 x 10 cm
Size: 10 x 10 cm
2. To the seaside
I love going to the beach and watching the sunset and recording the backs of strangers, these will make me think of those untold stories.
So I wanted to create a story of a visit to the seaside in a stream-of-consciousness way, imitating part of Woolf's narrative mode, a story that has to do with personal musings, with life. Perhaps a story that takes place in the middle of the day like Mrs Dalloway, or perhaps like To The Lighthouse, interweaving reality and the past with consciousness.