XINHUI XU    许心慧

Xinhui Xu was born in Shanghai, China. She studied BA Interior Design at Donghua University, China, and she is currently completing MA Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art, London.

Xinhui is a former interior designer and now an artist working with performance, oral histories and photography.

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Xinhui Xu employs dialogical processes that unfold slices of daily life as a narrative method. Interviews, documentary objects and oral histories come together in a form that follows the logic of the project to tell stories by the stories themselves. She performs and embodies others’ stories in order to pull their hidden value into the visual world and amplify the voices of their authors.

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Her practice aims to look beyond social labels and focus on others’ lived experience. In her most recent work She's Corrected, Xinhui starts directly from women's real experiences of self-objectification and visualises the oppression of women within patriarchy. When what you see is no longer those general and distant classifications and descriptions, but existence composed of lived experience, would that make a difference? 

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Daily objects, oral histories and embodiment of experience are tools she respects and cherishes. Documenting the life histories of ordinary individuals, Xinhui intends to communicate the complex relationship between individual encounters and social structures. She believes these fragments are keys to breaking the binary opposition between grand history and everyday life.

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‘Level of existence where events are not at all the large scale, momentous events of History, but the small scale, trivial, forgettable acts of bodily survival and self-maintenance.’ -- Flaudette May V. Datuin