By Sara Bright
There is a particular quality to the images Xinyu XuXX makes. They do not sit still, even when they should. Water bleeds into red hues; breath fogs the frame; something that might be an eyelash or a fragment of smoke drifts across a half-glimpsed body. These are not compositions in the conventional sense. They are encounters – sticky, unresolved, and deliberately difficult to categorise. The Chinese-born, London-based artist-filmmaker has, in a remarkably short career, built a body of work that does something most artists only gesture at: it makes the viewer feel complicit.
Born in 1998 in Huangshan, a city of mist and granite peaks in Anhui province, XuXX – who uses she/it pronouns – arrived in London to study first at the Royal College of Art and then at Goldsmiths, where she completed an MFA in Fine Art in 2023. She holds a BA in Fashion Design from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. The trajectory reads as linear, but the work it has produced is anything but. It is fractured, diasporic, and stubbornly resistant to the neat narratives that institutions like to impose on artists from East Asia working in the West.
The Lorde Foundation
The intellectual spine of XuXX’s practice is Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, a text that has seen a remarkable resurgence in recent years, particularly among artists and activists working at the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality. In that essay, Lorde describes the erotic as “a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognised feeling.” For XuXX, this is not an abstract proposition. It is a working methodology.
“It all started with Audre Lorde, a black feminist scholar whom I greatly admire,” XuXX told the Barcelona-based publication Al-Tiba9 Contemporary Art in 2023. “In her essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Lorde introduces the concept of creating an ‘erotic space,’ which is a field made up of erotic energy that surrounds an intimate connection.”
What XuXX has done with this foundation is distinctive. Rather than treating the erotic as metaphor or provocation, she has systematised it as a lens through which to examine the image itself – specifically, the moving image. Her works, from Swamp on My Balcony (2021–22), an early series experimenting with eroticism during her student years, to the more recent Vertical Dialogues (2024–25), a 14-minute short film supported by Arts Council England, treat the camera not as a recording device but as what she calls a “non-human body” – an entity capable of inhabiting space and generating what she terms “visionary erotic experiences.”
Chinese, Queer, Erotic: The Problem of Language
One of the more quietly radical threads in XuXX’s work is her interrogation of the Chinese-language distinction between 色情 (sèqíng, pornography) and 情色 (qíngsè, eroticism). The two terms share characters but carry vastly different moral weight. Pornography is illicit; eroticism is aesthetic. This is not merely a philological curiosity. In a cultural context where the state maintains strict censorship of sexual content, and where public discourse about desire remains heavily regulated, the question of what counts as erotic – and who gets to define it – is political in the most material sense.
XuXX has spoken about her interest in “the boundary between pornography and eroticism in the Chinese language context,” positioning her practice as an exploration of “pleasure activism and feminist porn-making” while simultaneously questioning the possibilities of erotic images beyond those frameworks. This dual commitment – to desire and to critique – gives her work an edge that distinguishes it from both the liberal sex-positivity of Western feminism and the more ascetic strands of Chinese contemporary art.
The Moving Image as Method
XuXX’s preference for moving image over still photography is not a stylistic choice so much as an epistemological one. “This fluid relationship between moving and still images fascinates me,” she told Al-Tiba9. The moving image, for her, captures something the photograph cannot: duration, impermanence, the way intimacy unfolds and dissipates in real time. Her creative process mirrors this philosophy. She records daily life on digital video with a deliberate openness and spontaneity, building an archive of footage that she later edits in long, solitary sessions – what she describes, without romanticising it, as a form of “social escapism.”
The results are films that resist narrative closure. The Room it Leaks (2023), her Goldsmiths MFA degree show piece, was selected for both the London Short Film Festival and the Queer East Festival in 2024. It runs to just over eleven minutes and refuses to explain itself. Coral Web (2022), an installation piece, blends visuals and sound to create what one reviewer described as “a morphed series of clips, enveloped like a dream.” The work titled Love is Eating Me, Because I’m More Delicious Than You (2023) – the title alone signals XuXX’s refusal of the demure – builds a “poetry-like narrative” through images that function less as representations than as, in her formulation, bodies in their own right.
Building a Screening Culture
If XuXX’s solo practice is introspective, her collaborative work is expansive. In 2023, she co-founded 水哨 Shuǐ Shào (If Splash as Your Whistle) with fellow artist Yuqing Lin, both RCA graduates. The project is an artist-led screening programme that showcases queer and diasporic moving image work through multimedia events. Its first event, held at the Goldsmiths CCA residency space in May 2023 in collaboration with the Gourd Canteen initiative, featured eleven Sinophone queer and diasporic artists and was reviewed by OnlyChild Magazine and Bittersweet.
The project’s ambitions have grown quickly. In 2024, 水哨 Shuǐ Shào was invited to serve as guest screening curators for the Queer East Festival, one of London’s most significant showcases for LGBTQ+ visual arts from East and Southeast Asia. They curated the programme Expanded: (un)Imaginary Swords, presenting artists’ short films that captured “vulnerability, intimacy, and illusionary multi-sensory experience.” The invitation was renewed for the 2025 edition of the festival – an endorsement of the programme’s curatorial vision that placed XuXX and Lin at the centre of a broader conversation about what queer Asian moving image practice looks like in Britain.
In spring and summer 2025, 水哨 Shuǐ Shào held a residency at SET Lombard Street in London. The project describes its work as exploring “the intersection of sound, image and sensation – like sound waves travelling underwater or splashes breaking the surface,” drawing on “spectral memory, feminist world-making and fragmented perception.” The language is deliberately poetic, but the practical effect is concrete: a growing network of artists, audiences, and venues committed to work that mainstream institutions still struggle to programme.
A Practice on the Move
XuXX’s international profile has expanded in parallel with her London activities. She was among the artists featured in the 17th Bienal de Artes Mediales de Santiago – Hiperrealidades – held in October 2025 at the Centro Cultural CEINA and Teatro Roma in Santiago, Chile. The Bienal, organised by the Corporación Chilena de Video y Artes Electrónicas since 1993, is one of the foremost platforms for electronic and media arts in Ibero-America. Its 2025 edition, curated by Nicolás Oyarce Carrión, interrogated Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality, asking how images multiply and fragment rather than pointing back to a single origin. XuXX’s presence in this context – alongside artists from across Latin America and Europe – marks a significant step in her trajectory beyond the UK-China axis.
Her short film Bubbles, a collaboration with artist Xiaoyu, has been shown at The Living Gallery in New York and participated in a film festival in Rotterdam. She was also included in shedding:::selves at Ugly Duck in London in April 2024, a landmark exhibition of queer East and Southeast Asian artists that brought together sculpture, painting, interactive installation, and video to forge “new readings, metamorphoses, and entanglements of personhood.”
What Comes Next
XuXX is currently working on two concurrent projects. Mist Monologue, an artist book in publication as of 2025–26, is being developed in parallel with Vertical Dialogues, a short film that received support from Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) programme in Round 19. The DYCP fund, which awards between £2,000 and £12,000 to individual cultural practitioners at an early to mid-point in their careers, is competitive – in Round 22, the most recent completed round, the Arts Council received over 2,600 eligible applications and funded 411 individuals. That XuXX secured funding in Round 19 speaks to the rigour of her proposal and the significance the council attaches to her trajectory.
The Mist Monologue project signals a shift toward text and the book form, though XuXX’s characteristic concerns – intimacy, displacement, the residue of emotion across territories – remain intact. The Vertical Dialogues short film, at just over fourteen minutes, is the longest individual work she has produced to date, suggesting an expanding confidence in sustained temporal structures.
The Erotic as Infrastructure
What makes XuXX’s practice important extends beyond the quality of her individual works. She is, in effect, building infrastructure – the screening programmes, the collaborative platforms, the networks of artists and audiences – that supports a kind of practice mainstream institutions have historically marginalised. Her engagement with Lorde’s philosophy is not decorative. It is structural. The erotic, in Lorde’s formulation and in XuXX’s application of it, is not about provocation or transgression. It is about connection – the “sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual,” as Lorde wrote, that “forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them.”
This is work that insists on pleasure as a form of knowledge, on intimacy as a political act, and on the image – moving, breathing, refusing to be still – as a site of resistance. In a London art world that often rewards the spectacular or the conceptually tidy, XuXX’s quiet revolution is gathering force. The mist from Huangshan, it turns out, travels further than anyone expected.
