MLitt Fine Art Practice School of Fine Art
Xinyu Zhang
Xinyu Zhang, from China, is about to complete her MLitt in Fine Art Practice at the Glasgow School of Art. Her practice revolves around the relationship between the body and its surrounding environment, articulated through the language of sculpture. She explores questions of belonging, emotional geography, memory, history, and structures of power, constructing immersive spaces that invite viewers to enter her perspective through her personal memories and perceptions of place.
Working primarily with ceramics, Zhang creates fragmented human sculptures placed within soil formations that echo the shapes of maps. Within these spaces, the sculptures function as fragmented archives, recording traces of migration, trauma, and survival. In the face of unstable social structures, her work seeks a fragile balance, rendering the tension between body and geography both tangible and open to reflection.
Resonance of Body and Soil
Introduction
In the series “Resonance of Body and Soil”, the body is conceived as part of the landscape—shaped and remapped by history, geography, and structures of power—raising questions of belonging and identity. Walking through a foreign city marked by fences, lines, and warning signs, I sensed how boundaries inscribed themselves onto my body, recalling the rivers and shifting shorelines of my hometown in China.
Fragments of the human form are cast and placed within soil collected from Glasgow, creating a layered field of cross-regional memory. The soil becomes both earth and map, recording belonging, displacement, and porous borders, while the body within it remains caught between burial and excavation, in continual dialogue with the land.
Project Links
Boundaries in Flux
Introduction
Wall-mounted sculptures echo the curves of rivers, fault lines, and territorial divisions, translating bodily forms into abstract topographies. Cast in glass wax, their translucent and fluid qualities render geographical borders as ambiguous and shifting. This shift from embodied presence to conceptual mapping reflects how bodies are often reduced to structures by state systems and cultural narratives.
Topographies of Memory
Introduction
This work is based on satellite imagery, with the trajectories of rivers printed onto textile. As one of the most fluid boundaries in geography, rivers simultaneously divide and connect territories. Their courses extend across the folds and textures of the fabric, resembling the veins of a body and carrying the flows of migration, memory, and history. The textile medium—soft and absorbent—translates geography from the scale of maps into the tactile surface of the body. Through this transformation, geography becomes fragile and intimate, inviting viewers to sense how space is continually reshaped through memory and perception.
