Xia was born in a small coastal town by the Bohai Sea in eastern China. The industrial shoreline, its skies, and its rhythms quietly shaped her sensibility. Frequent moves with her mother, a rural primary school teacher, drew her close to fields, village squares, and makeshift classrooms. That nearness to land and community seeded a longstanding attention to ecology, memory, and the ways spaces hold people together. Art became the way she revisits those sites of change and loss, translating them into acts that are simple on the surface yet resonant over time.

Her practice treats darkness not as emptiness but as an active, programmable medium that sculpts attention, behavior, and meaning. She calls this approach computational darkness, a three-layer visibility stack that sets up the optical and sensing substrate in space, choreographs perception and narrative through light and dark cues, and governs the rules and ethics so that lived experience can feed back to revise the work. By introducing bounded indeterminacy and inviting human or nonhuman living agents, including audiences and environmental signals, as well as fish, to trigger change, Xia shifts authorship from a fixed script to a negotiated encounter.

This philosophy is evident in works that blend personal history with spatial media. In 8 Hours and 21 Minutes, she unravelled a childhood sweater while walking her village paths, projecting absence as presence and letting the act outshine the artifact. In Red Balloons, everyday objects such as a treadmill, hair dryer, toilet, and river become carriers of time and change. Rhythm Gate relocates attention from light to sound: riders in an elevator cut and compose a live acoustic montage as the system recedes, honoring real human conversation and closing the loop between the conceived, the perceived, and the lived. Together, these works explore how small gestures, social choreography, and material doubt can create space for collective sense-making.

 

Currently, Xia is developing a body of responsive, ethically aware installations to create darkness ecologies, spaces where attention, agency, and care are co-authored in real-time. She aims to let simple gestures meet rigorous systems, so that the audience’s presence and the environment’s signals can continually reshape what the work becomes.