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grace xu is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tovaangar (Los Angeles) + Muwekma Ohlone Territory (San Francisco Bay Area)

Grace Xu 徐栩 (b. 2001) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Muwekma Ohlone Territory (San Francisco Bay Area) and Tovaangar (Los Angeles). They received a B.A. in Art with a Minor in Community Engagement and Social Change from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Their multidisciplinary practice borrows photography, video, sound, ceramics, and multisensory installations to find languages of belonging within collective memory, diasporic trajectories, and spi-ritual cosmologies. Prioritizing a voice of emotional tenderness in response to our ever unfolding present, their practice finds power in community and in conversation with our human and more-than-human world.

In their emerging practices, they recently shared space in a performance at the Feminist Center for Creative Work, wrote for Long Play Contemporary, exhibited at the New Wight Gallery and Little Gallery UCLA, and is a resident performer of Chinese folk music at UCLA Ethnomusicology.

Email gracexustudio@gmail.com to say hi + for any inquiries.

Ancestral Bodies Lantern

...like ashes like seeds like stars

芥子世界 Mountains In Mustard Seeds

Faces of Fremont: A Participatory Public Art Project

Ancestral Bodies Lantern (2023)

A sculpture, installation, and performance paying homage to ancestral migrant bodies and synthesizing their embodied knowledge as means of surviving the future, when impending catastrophes will soon make us all migrants on our earthly home.

Exhibited in the New Wight Gallery in December 2023.

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...like ashes like seeds like stars (2023)

A multisensorial installation using different forms of storytelling to re-connect with the social, political, and spiritual histories embodied in our human and more-than-human world. Photo (image) is myth through surfaces, writing is myth through interiority; materials are not myths, they are not believed into existence, but connection to materials may connect us to a collective memory, or suggest our absence in it.

This fluid space of memory is mapped by the relationships with the black mustard plant, its seeds, fire, ocean, sand, paper, language, and family photographs in this installation. As an exploration of by aesthetic strategies of decoloniality, this work invites storytelling and mythmaking as a mode of ritual repair; to re-member and re-connect with place, home, and community is the beginning of restoring rightful relationships with the land, with its past and present communities, and non-human kin.

Installation in the Little Gallery at UCLA in October 2023.

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芥子世界 Mountains In Mustard Seeds (2024)

Mountains In Mustard Seeds is a project born in the New Genres residency space granted by UCLA Department of Art. The project takes forms in a reasearch component excavating the historical palimpsests that created the invasive ecology of the black mustard (Brassica nigra), and a two-channel video projection on large levitating photographs with sound.

Channel 1, Ashes:
A space where multiple entities convene to collectively grieve and heal—ancestors who are re-enlivened and summoned through oral storytelling, the living gathered at dinner time, and elements of folk music and ambient sounds that mediate transitionings in this ephemeral moment of convening. This video uses images of the rapeseed bloom (Brassica napus) in its native ecology in Southern China.

Channel 2, Seeds:
In a terracotta vessel, a book enclosed in a coat of mustard seed and fiber paper lay burning on a ring of braided grasses and ashes. An activation of non-human agents, embodying the inflammation in our expanded corporealities, transition through histories unspoken.

Contending Parables: Mountains In Mustard Seeds (no. 1), Inkjet print, 64” x 34”, 2024.

Installation in the Little Gallery, 2024.

Contending Parables: Mountains In Mustard Seeds (no. 2), Inkjet print, 64” x 34”, 2024.

Video stills

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FACES OF FREMONT: A Participatory Public Art Project (2019-2022)

Inside Out: Faces of Fremont public installation at Valhalla Theater

Inside Out: Faces of Fremont at Irvington HS

Inside Out: Faces of Fremont exhibition at the Fremont Main Library

Student organizers at the Tri-City Free Breakfast Program

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Information

gracexustudio@gmail.com