About
Zixi Xia
I often begin with something I cannot stop looking at: a hand, the distance between two bodies, light falling across skin, or a gesture that stays with me long after an encounter. Sometimes the desire to make an image arrives before I understand what I want to say.For a long time, I tried to understand my photographs through questions and ideas. Those questions still matter to me, but lately I have found myself returning to the images themselves. I am interested in what happens unexpectedly, in what an image reveals or withholds, and in the things I cannot entirely explain. I want to make photographs that surprise me, rather than photographs that simply confirm what I already think.
My practice moves between intimate encounters, staged actions, and experiments with photographic materials. I am drawn to the photograph not only as something to look at, but also as something that can be touched, held, altered, or encountered in space.
My projects begin from different experiences and desires. I do not need them to arrive at the same answer. What continues to bring me back to photography is the act of making an image, and the possibility that it might become something I did not anticipate.
Zixi Xia (b. 2000, Guiyang, China) is a visual artist working primarily with staged photography and self-portraiture. Her practice examines the body as a site where intimacy, identity, memory, and gender are continually negotiated through images, performance, and everyday rituals.
Working predominantly in medium-format film, Xia constructs photographs that blur the boundaries between documentation and fiction. Rather than treating the body as a stable subject, her work explores how bodies are shaped through relationships, gestures, domestic spaces, and cultural expectations.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including Les Rencontres d’Arles (France), BBA Gallery (Berlin), Toolip Art Gallery (Budapest), SE Center for Photography (USA), and the Busan International Photography Festival (South Korea)
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