XI NAN (南希）

Xi Nan is an eclectic artist and innovator with physical disability based in New York, USA. She is originally from Jilin, China. She won the United States national second award of juried exhibition of emerging artists with disabilities and exhibited her work at the Smithsonian in 2011. She completed her MFA in ceramics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2015. Xi Nan’s unique technique of building unfired porcelain on fired work, and innovative working process drive her work exhibiting internationally. Currently, Xi’s invited to present her art in the Personal Structures exhibition of the Venice Art Biennial 2022 by the European Cultural Center Italy.

“I am thankful for i’m perfectly imperfect”

-Venice art biennial 2022,personal structures

 Infinity ∞ series is the result of deep introspection of personal growth and healing journey by an artist with physical disabilities. Xi Nan, a New York based artist created this series during the chaos of the pandemic. She was able to use this solitary time to consider personal values, and to examine her art practice while creating work at home.

Nan’s artistic journey taught her to create with what she had at the moment rather what she needs. The condition of Nan’s life continually saturates her work— journaling, observing, documenting and wearing her art; also creating individual habitats for work to live in. In the new pieces, the residue of material and Nan’s living leave traces in the orchestration of her art. 

Infinity ∞ series is a practice of self-mastery, stretching the artist to break the bounds of polarity and to expand herself no matter what the circumstances she is living. Mastering herself is a force to embrace all the possibilities to the fullest and to keep on expanding. 

The artist is not showing any “finished” work in this series. Nan’s pieces are in a continuous progressive state. They are kept raw, with the intent that the viewer can sense the work in growth, as well as the forces that limit her growth. 

Through making work, Nan visualizes her inner struggles, self-stagnancy, anxiousness, procrastination. At the same time, she has witnessed spiral growth, learning curves, and the tethers holding every fragment of herself. Nan seeks an equilibrium between limits and expansion; being unshakable, evolving with every inhale and exhale. These are the inner structures Nan has been learning and building upon in the Infinity ∞ series. 

Though Xi Nan was born differently from others, she has the ability to live to her fullest, able to rewrite, rewire, and reform herself to be her own idol. Nan’s father taught her to be persistent, learning and regaining physical abilities with every limb movement by practicing countlessly. As a child, Nan had no idea how it would feel like to lift her legs or right thumb. Her father trained her by holding her legs and thumb; lifting them for her until her muscles remembered the movements, and re-building the cognition and feelings in her brain, to awake her innate. Infinity ∞ series is a regrowth from the innate. Physical and mental ability is not just innate, but also acquired. Nan’s work with unfired porcelain on fired porcelain suggest the triggers of regrowth, the active and inactive made innate. The fired and unfired clay intertwined creating integration. 

The artist has learnt so much of letting go of the fear, the anxiousness of not being perfect by creating this Infinity ∞ series. Nan’s view that we are all different like the rays in the spectrum of light. Her differences are the uniqueness of who she is in this cosmos. Allowing and accepting the flaws and imperfections in her work has allowed her to accept and embrace every part of herself. Being vulnerable is not just letting the artist’s own wounds to be seen, but also to be healed and to transmute scars to be shiny medals. As Xi Nan says, “I am thankful for I am perfectly imperfect, and these are my personal structures.