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 graduated from the Critical Curatorial Cybernetics research master pragram at Haute école d’art et de design(HEAD), Geneva, Switzerland. She also works virtually as a 2D designer at Ralph Appelbaum Associates in New York City. She received an MFA in Communications Design from Pratt Institute in 2018, a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate 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




Floating Ghost

2022
Performative reading, sound design
The performance was created based on Xiao’s experience of walking the 27km accelerator tunnel at the European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN,) Switzerland. 

The tunnel underground goes through Switzerland and France. Xiao decided to walk over the ground in the physical landscape. Experiencing as both the human body and the atomic body in this walk, she senses the energy shifting and sensory transition. Xiao filmed the experience from the perspective of an unknown entity. The film was brought into the performance both as the scene and light source. 

Xiao tells a story from the first person perspective, of the “I” came into a world of the unknown, discovering its own body, in the unknown time and space. She draw with a chalk instrument sculpted by her. With the narration, the movement of her body and the instrument enchant a sensorium ghostly experience of discovering an unknown world.