Xing Danwen

In this new work, Thread, Xing examines the complexity of communication and connection between people. The artist and her mother serve as the main characters. On one screen are the aged hands of the artist’s mother, insistently knitting a dress with love and care, and on the other, the daughter wears the dress as it unravels with her movement. A feeling of liberation is evoked as the daughter’s body slowly becomes exposed but also fragile, and vulnerable. The daughter is trapped in the thread, but she moves forward with an uncontrolled drive. Although the two actions are separate and seem contradictory, the viewer senses a complicity between mother and daughter, as if they share an unspoken, secret understanding.

2017, Installation with Coal-coke and mixed materials

2017 凤凰艺术专访 | 邢丹文：现实是残酷的，但要敢于正视 | 作者 李鹏, 2017/10/06 邢丹文：在每一幅图像里重构现实 | 2017/10/10 文章刊登于《云端》杂志2017年第10期 Xing Danwen's "Captive of Love" by Tom Mouna, Art Asia PacificWeb, 2017/10/17 Art Radar, "Captive of Love": exploring urbanity with Danwen Xing at Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, 2017/10/17 雅昌专稿 | 邢丹文：一个藏在喧嚣背后的影像艺术家, 2017/10/18 王澈谈邢丹文：如何隐没？ 2017/10/20 流动，考察性思考和人文视角—邢丹文访谈, 《画刊》ARTMONTHLY magazine, 2017年第10期 "CHINSKA AWANGARDA PO 1989 ROKU", MAGDALENA DUBROWSKA, newspaper GAZETA WYBORCZA - WARSZAWA, 2017-10-20, str.:33 2016 William Schaefer, The Lives of Form: From Zhang Jin to Aaron Siskind, ASAP/Journal, Volume 1, Number 3, September 2016, pp. 461–486, by Johns Hopkins University Press 2014 Book The Reception of Chinese Art across Cultures, Edited by Michelle Ying-ling Huang, Chapter Twelve Reception of Xing Danwen's Lens-based Art Across Cultures by Silvia Fok, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Dec 2014, Page 255-277, in UK 2014, ISBN 978-1-4438-5909-7 2013 Interview and Featuring Danwen Xing, contemporary photography magazine BLINK, Issue #21, LET'S FALL IN LOVE, February 2013 Jelena Stojkovic, The City Vanishes: Urban Landscape in Staged Chinese Photography, Journal HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY, Volume 37, Issue 3, August 2013, UK, p360-369 Kitty Go, Focus: Artist Pension Trust, Uniting Commerce and Creativity, China Daily, 16–22 August 2013, p28-29 2012 Xing Danwen, When Art Happened, magazine LEAP, June, 2012, Beijing, p114-121 2011 Laurence King Publishing, ISBN 978-1-85669-787-3, UK, August 2011, P134-141 Shelley Rice, "Material Dreaming - Photography and Sculpture", magazine SCULPTURE, Vol.30 No.7, September 2011, New York, p48-53 俞若玫，“邢丹文：诗意摄影，折射社会发展光谱”，信报，Aug 24, 2011, 香港 陆斯嘉，三大外资行最新收藏艺术品趋势：他们最爱中国哪些艺术家，理财一周，C12-13 2010 John S Rosenberg, "Urban Utopias", Harvard Magazine, Sep/Oct, 2010, US, p32-35 Xing Danwen, "Xing Danwen", POINT -Asin Contemporary Art Magazine, Vol 1, October 2010, Korea, p24-31 Miss Papa, Life in Discovery, magazine (source name to be added), June 2010, China, p 48-51 Li Meiyan, magazine (source name to be added), Mar 2010, China, p108-109 Richard Vine, "Beijing Confidential - Xing Danwen", Art in America, Feb 2010, US, p84-93 Nico Tang, "The flâneur", City Magazine, Jan 2010, Hong Kong, p168 2009 Kevin Kwong, "Model Citizen", South China Morning Post, 8 December 2009, HongKong Bourree Lam, "Xing Danwen Interview", Time Out Magazine, 25 November 2009, Hong Kong Phoenix Zhang, MING magazine, Oct 2009, Hong Kong, p180-185 Yeewan Koon, "Seeing things her way", Muse Magazine, 8 December 2009, Hong Kong, p97-99 Lin Ri, Muse Art, Oct 2009, China, p66-68 Wang Xue, PIXEL, Sep 2009, No.2, China, p44-47 Madeleine Eschenbury, "Xing Danwen: Revealing the Masquerade of Modernity", YISHU, Vol 8 / Number 4, Jul/Aug 2009, Canada, p51-66 Bokyung Kim, "Xing Danwen", Monthly Photo, Aug 2009, Korea, p114-125 Luo Yi, Vogue, Aug 2009, China, p148-149 Li Jingjing, China Photo Press, 16 June 2009, China, p3 A Work of Persol, Vanity Fair, Italy, 6 May 2009, p131-132 Gu Zheng, Art China, No.5, 2009, China Paul Flynn, "Xing Danwen", Artist Profile, issue 7, April, 2009, Australia Liu Yue, Chinese Contemporary Art News, Apr 2009, No.51, Taiwan Book by Zhao Ying, Shandong Fine Art Publishing House, China, p162-175 2008 Xing Danwen, "A Personal Diary", Art Asia Pacific / 15th Anniversary Special Issue, Issue 61, Nov/Dec, 2008, US, p168-177 Holland Cotter, "China's Female Artists Quietly Emerge", The New York Times, Art & Design, 30 July 2008 Gu Zheng, Artco Magazine, July 2008, TaiWan, p64-73 and cover page Pan Guangyi, "Wall House", Artco Magazine, July 2008, TaiWan, p184-185 Cheng Guanghu, "Xing Dan Wen", Photographic Art Magazine, June 2008, Korea, p54-57 Cong Yun, World Photographic, June 2008, China Mette Holm,"Kinesiske Kunstnere har faet selvtillid", Billedkunstnernes Forbund, NR.2, June 2008, Denmark Jiang Yuejun, Guangzhou Daily, 29 March 2008, Saturday, China Zhu Yinan, Tianjin Daily, 25 April - 1 January 2008, China 2007 Staff Editor, ”邢丹文：小时后‘摩天大楼’的概念是需仰视的高楼而现在我们却在沙盘上俯视自己的未来”, Chinese Commercial Photography, No.19, Jan 2007, China, p56-59 Gu Zheng, "Projecting the Reality of China through the Lens: On the Artistic Practice of Xing Danwen", Chinese Photography, April 2007, China, p64-73 book "China Post Contemporary Art" by Jiang Ming, ISBN 978-986-82691-0-1, September, 2006, China, p129-133 2006 Jean-Claude Vantroyen, "Les minidrames de Xing Danwen", Le Soir, p25 p28. Mercredi 27 December 2006, Belgium Eleonora Battiston, "Xing Danwen", ZOOM magazine, p32-37, November/December 2006, Italy Alain Jullien, "Les autofictions virtuelles de Xing Danwen", Le Monde 2, no 144. p50-57, Supplement, 18 November 2006, France Gu Zheng, "Fictions smash the Illusory Reality", PhotoChina magazine, p28-33, Nov 2006, China Xiao Bei, "Xing Danwen: presumptions on the urban fiction", Modern Weekly - Citylife, 25 November 2006, China, p32 ELLE DECO, Vol. 107, No. 10, May 2006, China, p117 Zhang Na, Beijing Youth Weekly, Vol. 573, No. 36, Sept 14-20, 2006, China, p8-13

Selected exhibitions include Seeing Utopia, Past and Future-Wang Di and Xing Danwen, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, US, 2010; In A Perfect World..., Ooi Botos Gallery, Hong Kong, 2009; Wall House, project space at Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney, Australia, 2008; disCONNEXION, Kiang Gallery, Atlanta, US, 2004; and Urban Fiction, Galerie Piece Unique, Paris, France, 2004.

Author: Richard Vine Prestel Publishing Ltd., 2008, ISBN 978-3791339429

In 2007, Xing continued her exploration of urban architecture and her relationship to the city of Beijing through the series Wall House.

2007, Multimedia installation with photographs & video projection

Authors: Dan Cameron, Peter B. Lewis, Toby Devan Lewis, Mark Schwartz, foreword by Toni Morrison Distributed Art Pub, 2007, ISBN 978-1933045726

Author: Frsnces Bowles Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2007, ISBN 87-91607-38-8

Xing began her series Urban Fiction in 2004, which features photographs of architectural maquettes that Xing encountered at real-estate developers’ offices into which she inserted cutout figures that are enacting a scene of domestic drama. Urban Fiction has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as part of the exhibition "Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China", and at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

2004 – present, photography with digital manipulation

One of Xing's first major works was the series disConnexion (2002-2003), large-scale photographs of wires, circuit boards, and other computer waste exported from the United States to China's Guangdong Province.

In 1998, she went to New York with a grant and fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council, New York. There, she did her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York with a chairman grant from SVA from 1998-2001.

1995, B/W Photographs. Featured in ANU /Verso 2019 publication Afterlives of Chinese Communism edited by Christian Sorace, Ivan Fraceschini, nad Nicholas Lumbere.

In the late 80s, she was drawn to photography. Self-taught in photography, she was the one of a few artists in late 80s and 90s in China exploring the boundaries of photography and using photography as an art form. Through the camera, she observed and challenged the questions on Chinese society, humanity, female identity and the generation born in the 60s. Xing documented the performance art movement among the East Village artists in Beijing in the early 1990s.

In A Personal Diary, Xing presents a highly poetic work that evinces her acute ability to inscribe China's alternative art scene in the 1990s into her own personal narrative.

The artist started her visual art practice with painting medium in her teens. From 1982-1986, she studied painting at the art school affiliated to Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts. From 1989-1992, she continued painting and earned her BFA in oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Art.

Xing Danwen was born in 1967 in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, China. Her parents worked as engineers in a state-owned energy company.