Artist Profile Huiyi Xiao

Xiao’s gripping performance maps cultural dislocation onto the body through intense, moving acts of physical inscription.

Artist Statement

The Unwritten Weight of Words is an experimental video work that stages a visceral encounter between language, power, and the diasporic body. Rooted in the artist’s migration from China to Australia, the work confronts the lived experience of ideological dislocation, where the disciplinary forces and patriotic narratives of the Chinese state collide with Australian liberalism and managed multiculturalism. Through an interdisciplinary fusion of performance, text, sound, and moving image, it stages the body as both a site of inscription and a medium of resistance. Sonic layers of accented English and muffled Mandarin clash and cohabit, creating a haunted, unresolvable soundscape. This work resists assimilation into a single narrative or meaning, instead inviting viewers into a cross-sensorial space of relation, rupture, and excess.

Artist Biography

I am a Chinese-Australian artist working across performance-based video, installation, and photography to conduct a somatic inquiry into the diasporic condition. As a first-generation migrant, I investigate how cultural and political forces are internalized, resisted, and rewritten within the body. Through an auto-ethnographic process, I transform personal experience into constellations of metaphorical body-installations and performances. I position my body as a living archive, which I extend using found objects and resonant sites that signify external realities. Rejecting linear narratives, I employ experimental video strategies to document and fragment these performances, building layered works with confessional narration and ambient sound. My aim is to render the invisible weight of ideology and economic systems tangible, giving form to the complex affective fracture of living between worlds.