Xinyi Xu is a London-based artist whose practice focuses on found and natural objects, using materials such as shells, bones, stones, food, and steel as her primary languages. With the background of growing up in the coastal area of Shenzhen, her closeness to the sea and nature comes out naturally and continues to shape her sensibility. Her ten years of training in Chinese painting instilled a sensitivity to line and form which quietly informs her sculptural works she creates .
Xu’s curiosity for culture, family bonds and sea, encourages her to begin her creative journey and navigate her practice with the awareness of diversity and displacement. Her move to London in 2022 deepened her reflections on identity, belonging, and existence, placing her work in dialogue with the fragile conditions of displacement and cultural rupture.
Xu approaches sculpture through simple existing materials that are both fragile and industrial at the same time. By collecting, assembling, reconstructing, and suspending, she transforms discarded or ignored materials into new narratives. Her academic background in international relations also allows her work to engage critically with a broader social structures of identity. Her works are always intended to emerges a deeply personal and politically resonant, exploring how individuals navigate between worlds.
One of her earliest work Veins of Gold (2023) represents a cluster of potatoes sprayed in gold and placed within a steel frame. The gesture is simple and even a little absurd: ordinary food dressed up as treasure. Yet potatoes are everywhere—on a Chinese table they appear in stews, in Britain they arrive as chips. They are symbols of survival and hunger, rarely of wealth. By coating them in gold, Xu highlights the contrast into view and asks why certain things are seen as valuable while others are overlooked. The piece connects directly to her own experience of moving between China and the UK. The potatoes carry a dual memory: one tied to family meals and rootedness , another to her present life in London. More than a metaphor about values, the work becomes a bridge of two worlds, a way to hold memory, migration and trains of thought.
In Siren’s Homeland (2024), Xu creates a distinct mood with an oversized ear woven from wire, shells, and fragments of stone. At first glance it appears almost playful, like a piece of broken architecture, but the longer one looks the heavier it feels. An ear naturally suggests listening, yet here it also signals refusal—the fact that not every voice is heard. The materials give the work its unease: cold steel holding fragile shells that still carry a memory of the sea. This piece is not subtle in its symbolism, but the tension between hard and soft, weight and fragility, reflects Xu’s own negotiation with displacement and the difficulty of communication across cultures. It is both stubborn and vulnerable, a structure that looks like it could collapse but insists on standing.
The most understated of her works Symphony (2025) uses wood and stones collected during weekend walks in Folkestone. Arranged on the floor, the pieces evoke fragments of a skeleton or a small altar, though everything comes straight from the landscape. There is no gold spray, no oversized ear, just the quiet arrangement of found things. This openness gives the work its strength. Instead of imposing a fixed metaphor to the audiences, it leaves room for associations: survival, memory, the slow cycles of nature. It suggests a direction where Xu might find greater depth, not by rendering symbols more obvious, but by allowing materials to speak for themselves.
From the potato to the stones, Xu’s work reveals both clarity and risk. She consistently works with contrasts—precious and ordinary, listening and silence, fragility and weight. At times the metaphors arrive too quickly, but there is honesty in his approach, and that is hard to ignore. Rooted in her love of the sea, the close bond with family and the mirgation background, her work carries a trace of home even in displacement. The potatoes still gleam, the ear still listens, and the stones from Folkestone still quietly lie on the floor—holding both the weight of experience and the possibility of what comes next.
