Yu Xia

About Contact Statement

Statement

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with building systems. Nearly every project begins as a frame—rules, interfaces, mirrors, oppositions. You could call it a structuralist habit. What keeps me curious, though, is what the frame fails to hold: the margins, the bleed, the parts that go missing in the world and in ourselves.

A small example is this website. It began on a white background; when I turned it black, whole paragraphs quietly disappeared because they were already black. I traced them and flipped them to white. That small act—making visible what a structure erases—mirrors my studio practice.

I set up order to reveal what order hides. This tension runs through everything I make: story in the motion of music—Synesthetic Suite; freedom in mirrored reflection—Fatal-is or Free-will; burden in binaries—Half the Sky, Half the Tie. I keep the system, but I work along its edges. For me, the work lives less in the grid than in what becomes visible when the grid is stressed.