Wendi Xie

Wendi Xie (b. 1989) lives and works in Shenzhen and Dongguan, China. She received her Master of Arts Degree from the Royal College of Art, London in 2012, and Bachelor of Arts Degree from China Academy of Art, Hangzhou in 2010.

Xie is an artist whose practice spans sculpture, imagery, and site-specific installation, with glass as her central material language. Her practice investigates multiple layers of relationship—between materials, between experience and memory, and between the self and the external world.

Her process is rooted in a deep engagement with materiality and technique, ranging from handcraft to the transformation of industrial readymades. This approach results in forms that are structurally precise yet poetically charged, where emotion is encoded with restraint—residing in the fragility of a material, the tension of a form, or within a negative space.

A defining direction of her current work is to weave personal lived observation and socio-historical awareness into her material narratives. Past works have used laminated imagery to trace family dynamics, or employed glass’s metaphors of transparency and labor to examine hidden social and gendered relations. Building on this foundation, she is now distilling insights from life’s encounters, pursuing an expression of emotion that is grounded in form and earned through experience, toward a rational synthesis of material, method, and lived understanding.

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Her  residency at S12 will focus on realizing the core experimental phase of my project, The Northern Filter. This project interrogates the romanticized lens through which we view the Nordic landscape, questioning whether we discover places or project our inner longings onto them.