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 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 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




The Uncanny Cosmos

2022
Performative reading

The Uncanny Cosmos was written as an autobiography. Ruyun Xiao traces the moments of her growing up in the accelerating modernization period of China where she was submerged in the dissonance between science and spirituality. 

The performance reading draws a connection to the action of drawing, a visualization process to introduce an unseen world. Her body movement of drawing and erasing demonstrate the relation between herself, her body, and her sensation, with the memories. Trying to make sense of these moments in her life, she translates an understanding between the graininess of spirituality and the molecular physical world.