Artist Profile Sarah Xu

Xu’s material alchemy reimagines ancestral porcelain as a pierced, tactile skin mapping the complexities of diaspora.

Artist Statement

Rouleau Vase is based on an extant Ming Dynasty vase, cast to resemble human flesh, and tattooed with typical tattoo equipment. The larger series is grounded in the combination of porcelain and tattoo practices and imagery, through which I explore themes of identity, tradition, and femininity as a Chinese American. I reflect on my own tattooed body and the cultures that were passed to it, and how they persist, transform, or be forgotten. My American suburban home with its cookie cutter stature sits between clouds and mountains pulled from Chinese porcelain designs. Conflicting styles somehow settle in a single landscape of pine trees. Made-up Hanzi characters decorate the top, a nod to the my own illiteracy despite years of fluent speaking, as well as people’s affinity in getting botched tattoos of Hanzi merely for the aesthetic. A body becomes a vase, a womanly vessel. Heavy, squishy, bouncy, and pierced, so unlike the delicate brittleness of porcelain my ancestors wished me to be. Fair skinned, elegant, beautiful to look at, resigned to sit atop a high shelf. Heritage becomes embedded into skin. An embodied human chinoiserie, a Western facsimile of authentic Eastern-ness.

Artist Biography

Sarah Xu is a Chinese-American multidisciplinary artist raised in North Carolina and currently based in Brooklyn. Her works are often rooted in reframing memory and upbringing, interpreting the Chinese American diasporic experience, and blending the physical, digital, and traditional through creative experimentation. She recently received her BFA in Interactive Media Arts at NYU Tisch.