Guan Xiao's (born 1983 in Chongqing,
China) approach to the world challenges a canon of scientific knowledge of things formerly known as “known and predictable”. She attaches equal importance to objects, people and phenomena, which she sees as being permanently in flux and shaped by the environment they are exposed to. For her, people are affected not only by direct experience, by what they feel, but also how they perceive things. Many of her works offer a visual rendering of this process of transformation, as part of her ongoing investigation into the conditions under which the transformation of objects and people takes place. She is an artist who works with ready-mades, albeit using an updated approach based on gathering images from the Internet, which she interconnects in an intuitive way. She is often wrongly referred to as a post-Internet artist, though she does not disseminate her work online, preferring to use the Internet as an image bank in a quest to understand how it shapes people and how it defines our understanding of the world. For Guan Xiao, identity is based not on our geographical location, but on who what we see and what we hear.
