Postgraduate Degree Show 2025
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MLitt Fine Art Practice School of Fine Art

Fancy Xin Fan

Fancy Xin Fan is an image-based artist whose practice explores the delicate intersections of body, ritual, and the female experience within social structures. Working across embroidery, photography, and moving image, she investigates how cultural traditions, symbols, and ceremonies shape and obscure women’s identities. Through red threads, fabric textures, and veiled figures, her work reveals traces of endurance, vulnerability, and silent resistance, inviting viewers to confront the unseen forces embedded in everyday life.

Contact
molamola0103@gmail.com
x.fan3@student.gsa.ac.uk
@fanxyfancy_
Projects
Under the Crimson Shroud

Under the Crimson Shroud

Project Introduction

Under the Crimson Shroud uses the Chinese bridal veil as a lens to explore the dynamics of marriage and women’s visibility within it. Traditionally, the veil conceals the bride’s face until the groom unveils her, reflecting the transfer of a woman from her family to her husband. In this project, the veil serves as a symbolic medium to reveal the endurance, vulnerability, and silenced voices of women that are often obscured by marital conventions.

The work combines an embroidered crimson veil—decorated with orchids, uterus, and teardrops—with photography, moving image, and installation. Hand-stitched embroidery conveys both care and constraint. In the photographic series, the veiled figure wears a white cheongsam, with hands bound behind her back and her body contorted into a vase-like shape, highlighting women’s ornamental roles. Polaroid double exposures further fragment the figure, emphasising the multiplicity and erasure of identity.

The exhibition space is designed as a ritual-like environment. A printed fabric curtain serves as a threshold; bells and red threads delineate the perimeter, and photographs are mounted with hidden nails and surrounding thread, suggesting latent violence. When viewers lift the fabric curtain, it triggers the bells, creating an interactive and immersive experience.

In the video projection, the veiled figure appears in everyday landscapes—cemeteries, parks, and walkways—mostly motionless, silent, and statuesque. The editing heightens this dissonance, holding shots longer than usual, stretching time into discomfort. In the final shot, she lifts the crimson veil and places it over the camera lens. Her face remains hidden, but the gesture implicates the viewer, suggesting that anyone could become the next “bride,” silenced and absorbed into the structures that govern women’s identities. The veil no longer hides her alone—it extends over the lens, merging her presence with the viewer.

Through these elements, Under the Crimson Shroud reflects on how tradition, ritual, and marriage shape women’s bodies and identities, exposing subjugation often hidden beneath an appearance of harmony, while inviting viewers to consider their own position within these structures.

 

 

Project Links

Embroidered Crimson Shroud

The crimson shroud is hand-embroidered with motifs of orchids, uterus, and tears, using loop stitches and thick threads. Its surface carries deliberate abrasions and splits, as if scarred by time. Traditionally, the bridal veil conceals the bride until the groom unveils her, marking her transfer as possession. Here, the veil resists its role of purity and beauty, transforming into a surface of wounds and symbols. The embroidery questions how marriage and reproduction leave invisible scars upon women, turning celebration into sacrifice.
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Red Bridal Veil

For Sale: £99.99
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Along the four edges of the crimson shroud, I replaced the traditional tassels with rows of safety pins. At first glance, they echo the decorative fringe of bridal veils, but their sharp metallic form disrupts the softness of the fabric. The pins symbolise chains and restraint, suggesting how marriage, under the guise of beauty and tradition, binds women in silence. What appears as ornament is, in truth, a line of wounds.
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Red Bridal Veil
For Sale: £99.9
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Photography Series

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Photography Series

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Photography Series

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Photography Series

Her body stands in silence, wrapped in a white cheongsam, hands hidden behind her back. A vase without arms. An ornament without voice. The red shroud covers her face—she could be anyone, or no one at all.
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Photographic Installation

The photographs are mounted not with clean frames, but with aged dark nails driven directly into the wall. Around each nail, thin red threads coil into fragile circles, echoing both halos and wounds. From the front, the nails remain almost invisible, presenting an illusion of harmony. Yet from a different angle, their sharpness and violence become apparent—an allusion to how marriage often appears orderly and serene on the surface, while concealing pain beneath. This method of installation transforms the photographs into more than images: they are pinned, bound, and scarred, mirroring the experiences of women fixed within structures of tradition.
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In addition to nails and thread, several photographs are fixed with small safety pins. Their scale makes them almost invisible at first glance, yet their presence is sharp and intrusive. Unlike the permanence of nails, safety pins carry an illusion of care and security—yet they still pierce the surface, binding the image in place. The pins evoke the idea of chains: small, repetitive links that quietly fasten women to invisible structures. They suggest that the constraints of marriage are not always overtly violent, but often disguised as protection, order, or necessity. What seems delicate and temporary is, in truth, another form of restraint.
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Polaroid Series

The Polaroid series uses double exposure to fracture the veiled figure into overlapping shadows. The instant photograph, usually a medium of intimacy and memory, here becomes unstable—faces blur, bodies dissolve, identities multiply and vanish. Each frame resists clarity, suggesting that the veiled woman is not singular but countless: fragments of lives erased or hidden within the structures of marriage. The use of Polaroid reinforces the tension between presence and disappearance. What should be a record of memory instead becomes a site of loss, a reminder that these unseen women exist yet remain unnamed.
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Fabric Curtain

At the entrance of the exhibition, a printed fabric curtain hangs as a threshold. From outside, the curtain only half-conceals the interior; through it, the outlines of photographs on the walls can be faintly seen, creating an uncanny sense of anticipation.
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Fabric Curtain

To step inside, the viewer must lift or part the curtain—an action that echoes the wedding ritual of the groom unveiling the bride. In this gesture, the audience unconsciously takes the role of the one who “claims” the veiled woman, becoming implicated in the tradition the work critiques. The curtain thus transforms a simple entrance into a ritual act, confronting viewers with their own position as both witness and participant.
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Fabric Curtain

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Video Work

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Video Work

The video follows the veiled woman as she drifts into everyday environments—parks, streets, even the cemetery. She remains still and silent, her identity hidden. In the final sequence, she walks towards the camera and lifts the crimson shroud, placing it over the lens. This gesture breaks the fourth wall, implicating the viewer: the shroud could fall on you, suggesting that countless unseen brides exist not only in the past but also among us today.

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