Guan Xiao fuses techno-futurism with Chinese iconography to create a new sculptural language

The starting point of Beijing-based artist Guan Xiao’s works is everyday objects. In her sculptures, she combines tires, ropes, lamps, motorcycle knee pads, or umbrellas with abstract creations of her own. These are rooted in traditional Chinese iconography, and she uses the resulting contrast to invent a visual language that breaks historical and cultural boundaries. Works such as Pond (2019) and A Sinking Blue Field (2019) speak to Guan’s ingenious ability to create objects that defy classification. They almost operate as surrogates for living beings, sparking a connection that goes beyond the traditional artwork-viewer relationship. Standing in front of a Guan Xiao sculpture makes you feel as if you had just encountered a strange creature unbeknownst to anyone else – a harbinger of the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway’s epoch where living and non-living beings are inextricably linked.

Though challenging, the narrative structure of Guan’s works helps audiences understand without getting lost. This is especially evident in the artist’s video works. In her video triptych Just A Normal Day (2019), Guan created a dazzling mosaic of recorded images. The visual frenzy becomes readable, palpable, congealing like an abstract, sculptural existence. Unlike her earlier works, which explored the close relationship between rhythm and visual materials, the artist’s time-based media works have developed over the past couple of years into what she calls ‘image sculptures’. In Just a Normal Day, multifarious passages reminiscent of a road movie drive the work forward. It features heavy use of spoken slang and barely discernable electronic music, as well as a mysterious, motionless body. Gradually ridding the piece of cultural, historical, and chronological references, the artist ends up addressing classic opposites: heaven versus earth, home versus exile, familiarity versus estrangement. 

Whether in her sculptures or videos, Guan showcases her understanding of life as it exists in the current world. Through subtle details and an absurdist touch, she playfully demonstrates that social and cultural identity can be questioned over and over again. We are shaped by the environments in which we live, yet we are never actually in full control of the variables that define them. Is that funny or tragic? A bit of both, Guan Xiao seems to say.

In Miami Beach, Guan’s gallery, Antenna Space, will pair her works with pieces by Allison Katz. In her paintings and ceramics, the American artist blends surrealist mystery with expressionist intensity. Katz’s canvases are akin to reports from her own thought processes, rhythmed by the recurrence of specific motifs: segments of the female body, animals, plants, and her own initials, among other things. Combined together, these elements are like cobblestones forming a path leading back into the artist’s mind. Every single one of her elusive yet clearly thought-out paintings is charged with a kind of internal power that stems from her vivid imagination. Katz is skilled at sharing it with the viewer, often revealing elements that in theory do not exist. For example, her ‘Cock Paintings’ series features roosters rendered in various styles and placed on backgrounds that exist in the artist’s inner world only. By doing so, Katz creates a conceptual gateway into her own universe. She has quoted from Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando to help viewers understand her work: ‘A voice answering a voice.’

According to Simon Wang, Antenna Space’s founder and director, the gallery’s upcoming presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach will be small scale and very detailed. The artists’ works are ‘shape-shifting and fast-paced when it comes to language,’ he explains. Both Katz and Guan are fascinated by historical, mythological, science-fictional, and art historical materials and references. Visitors can look forward to seeing a booth dense with humor, wit, and open-ended questions.

Guan Xiao is represented by Antenna Space (Shanghai) and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler (Berlin). 

Discover more artists and galleries participating in Art Basel Miami Beach's Nova sector here.

Top image: Guan Xiao, photographed by Mathilde Agius for Art Basel.