Michelle Xiu Jin

About

I am a contemporary art practitioner working through a praxis of curating, research, and art-making. My practice unfolds through an ongoing negotiation with translation, affect and the ineffable. I received my BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with a background in painting, photography, and performance.

Affect is the current that carries me through experience—not as a rejection of rationality, but as a way of tracing a preconsciousness shaped by the temporal and the spatial. In my attempt to distill and amplify the embodied intensity of living in the present, I have become particularly attuned to what is lost in translation.

I often feel some kind of unease in translation, a nameless tension in which significance is forever lost in transience. I move in circles, circling ever closer to a sense of proximity, yet never quite reaching its core. Anxiety has been the only mode through which I have consistently felt emotionally appropriate. In the over-proximity to something ineffable, something that resists articulation, I have learned to let go of the need for clarity. Instead, I choose to embrace uncertainty, allowing it to become a sensitive force that activates my curatorial method and transforms anxiety into an open stance within my practice.

My curatorial agency seeks to build situations of encounters that shift emphasis from interpretation to sensation, opening a space to the landscape of human affect. Through bodily arousal, the body becomes a membrane—porous, receptive, and capable of channeling what cannot be spoken, what lies beyond the reach of logistic registers.