Becoming Myth-Publication

RUYUN XIAO

Ruyun Xiao is an artist, writer, researcher, exhibition designer, and illustrator from China. She explores the concept of bodily knowledge through performative form. Her imaginative process embodies herself in first-person memories, stories, and myths. She produces frameworks and instruments to choreograph experiences of the unknown. Using writing as the foundation, she engages with performance, design, publication, and sound to communicate sensorium ways of knowing and unknowing.

Xiao is currently based in London, United Kingdom. She recently started her own publishing and exhibition design practice, the little studio, with designer Ruxing Xiao. She graduated from the Critical Curatorial Cybernetics research master program at Haute école d’art et de design(HEAD), Geneva, Switzerland. She worked as a 2D designer at Ralph Appelbaum Associates in New York City for six years. She received an MFA in Communications Design from Pratt Institute in 2018, a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in graphic design from the Maryland Institute College of Arts in 2016, and a BA in Advertising from the Beijing University of Technology in 2015.

performances, exhibitions

Design

Writing, Publishing

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Instagram.

Becoming Myth

2026
PUblication

The book written by its designer Ruyun Xiao, is a story about a floating ghost who carries generations of memories and sensations into a new cosmos. The narrative is set in this unknown cosmos that has been conceptualized through her research of quantum physics and Chinese Daoist thinking through writing and drawing.

The book contains the narrative along with footnotes. The footnotes narrated how the story and knowledge came to be, becoming an autobiographical layer in the story. Each spread started with the story on the right-hand side and footnotes on the left after flipping the page. The footnotes take up more and more space along with the story, with its enlarged number type to emphasize its weight in Xiao’s practice.

Between each chapter, are the conjuring moments, where Xiao uses poetic language to reflect performance moments. The horizontal design leads the readers to rotate the book and at the same time change to a different mindset. The expressive layout reflects the performative aspect of the text.

The writing of the book came from Xiao’s experience of a generation growing up in the accelerating developing China. It reflects the dissonance and uncanniness in the ways of knowing. The black coarse cloth cover represents the roughness of this dissonance and invokes the mythical world-building. The rough touch triggers a body sensation and conveys the bodily knowledge that has been embedded in the book.