Yaxian Zhu

Print (MA)
Personal photo of Yaxian Zhu: a young woman with medium-length wavy black hair, wearing an orange-red plaid one-shoulder top, standing in front of a railing.
Installation view of the degree show. A 3-meter section of an 11-meter Juan paper scroll is displayed on the wall, with a video performance playing on a screen beside it.
Installation view of the degree show. A 3-meter section of an 11-meter Juan paper scroll is displayed on the wall, with a video performance playing on a screen beside it.
RCA2025 Degree Show -- A Thousand Kisses （千字吻） Medium: Printmaking, Performance, Video Material: Xuan paper scroll, black lipstick, etc. Dimensions: Xuan paper scroll: 1350×38cm; Video: 5 min Year: 2025.
A woman kneeling on the floor during a performance, repeatedly kissing and leaving lip prints on a grid of the xuan paper laid in front of her.
A woman kneeling on the floor during a performance, repeatedly kissing and leaving lip prints on a grid of the xuan paper laid in front of her.
The performance is accompanied by spoken recitation, layering voice and gesture into a rhythmic, embodied script. The performer reads from the Thousand Character Classic (千字文） and imprints it onto the grid.
Close-up of Juan paper with black lip prints stamped inside red square grids.
Close-up of Juan paper with black lip prints stamped inside red square grids.
Details
Rolled Juan paper scroll with rows of printed grids, each containing stamped lip marks.
Rolled Juan paper scroll with rows of printed grids, each containing stamped lip marks.
In the long breath of history, a kiss lands where a word once stood—tender, aching, and quietly disobedient.
Installation view of the degree show. A 3-meter section of an 11-meter Juan paper scroll is displayed on the wall, with a video performance playing on a screen beside it.
A woman kneeling on the floor during a performance, repeatedly kissing and leaving lip prints on a grid of the xuan paper laid in front of her.
Close-up of Juan paper with black lip prints stamped inside red square grids.
Rolled Juan paper scroll with rows of printed grids, each containing stamped lip marks.

About

Yaxian Zhu is a Chinese artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores the entangled relationships between language, identity, and power. Working primarily with printmaking, sound, performance, and installation, she employs material experimentation and embodied engagement to construct visual and sensory narratives. With a foundation in traditional calligraphy, her work reflects a critical inquiry into how inherited visual systems—particularly those rooted in Chinese cultural and linguistic traditions—can be deconstructed and reimagined within contemporary contexts. She investigates how writing has shifted from a communicative tool to a symbolic structure loaded with gendered, institutional, and ideological codes.

Over time, her practice has evolved from brush-based expression to a more bodily and process-oriented approach, integrating sound, text, and physical gestures as tools of resistance and transformation. By working across mediums and disciplines, she challenges fixed modes of representation and explores the instability and potential of language when filtered through the body. Influenced by feminist thought, she considers writing not only as a visual or linguistic act, but as an intimate and subversive gesture—one that creates space for vulnerability, visibility, and the reclamation of embodied experience.

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