Guan Xiao was born in Chongqing, Sichuan province, in 1983. She received a BA in film-directing from the Communication University of China in 2006. She currently lives in Beijing.
Guan works with multimedia as well as with sculpture and installation. Her art explores the aesthetic and cognitive possibilities of identity and meaning. That is, she looks at how ways of seeing are influenced by digital imagery, which is now the dominant source of knowledge and information exchange. Often this involves juxtaposing past and future, the primitive and the high-tech. Guan Xiao’s work disregards linear time; instead she considers diverse cultures and artifacts in a more holistic manner. Her comparisons of geographically and chronologically disparate objects expose the similarities between civilisations, regions, but avoid solid conclusions.
The exhibition Something happened like never happened was a buoyantly humorous piece that offered an artistic commentary on the madness that surrounds masterpieces in the world’s largest and busiest museums.
David is about Michelangelo’s statue – both the original at the Accademia di Belle Arti and the countless copies and reproductions that one encounters all over Florence.
Guan exhibited at 13th Lyon Biennale and participated in the 2015 Surround Audience, part of the triennial at the New Museum in New York. Other group exhibitions include Don’t You Know Who I Am: Art After Identity Politics at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Antwerp; Degeneration at OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shanghai. She has also shown work at the Queens Museum, New York; Stavanger Art Museum, Norway; the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; the Daimler Contemporary in Berlin; the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen; the V&A, London; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul. Her work also features in Hans Ulrich Obrist’s book The Future Will Be…China.