Xu Sanhuang graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and currently lives and works in Guangzhou.
Xu Sanhuang’s practice grows out of a long-term engagement with paper and natural materials. Through installation, she explores the continually evolving relationships between people, objects, and their environments. Beginning with material behavior and subtle processes of change, she works through support, tension, imbalance, and transformation to bring otherwise imperceptible relationships and forces into view. She emphasizes the latent potential of the hand, approaching making as a way of understanding the world and continually discovering relationships.
In 2019, she founded ssan studio and has collaborated with brands including Hermès, Aesop, and Tencent.
“For a period of time, my practice began primarily with materials themselves. I have continuously paid attention to the threshold states that plants, paper, branches, stones, and other materials enter under the effects of gravity, tension, wind, and time, as well as to changes that are subtle, slow, and almost imperceptible. As the work developed, I gradually realized that “thresholds,” “balance,” and “subtle change” may not be the final subjects I am trying to address. Rather, they have become ways of seeing relationships. A state that appears stable is, in fact, sustained by many forces that continue to act upon it. This realization has increasingly intersected with my observations of relationships in everyday life. Seemingly insignificant and repetitive actions—collecting, caring, waiting, responding, repairing—often participate more deeply in the formation and transformation of relationships than more visible events do. My attention has therefore begun to shift from the threshold states of materials themselves toward the small yet continuous forces that allow relationships between people, between people and objects, and between people and their environments to endure, change, or be re-established. At the same time, I have begun to loosen my previous assumptions about materials and form, allowing greater space for intuition, experimentation, and making. Through the ongoing process of working, I continue to ask: what allows a relationship to endure, and what causes it to change?“