Quiet Resilience: Alternative Modernity in Xu Xiaoxiao's "Ki Ki So So Lhargyalo"

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Event

Start Date

8-3-2026 1:31 AM

Description

This essay focuses on contemporary Chinese photographer Xu Xiaoxiao's interpretation and representation of the kinship and estrangement between body and landscape, modernity and heritage, culture and nature. In her most recent series of work titled “Ki Ki So So Lhar Gyalo,” Xu explores the nuanced entanglement between the people of Ladakhi (located in the far north of India, a land of rich Tibetan Buddhist tradition and cultural diversity) and its fast evolving environment due to challenges posted by military expansion, policy shifts, tourism, and urbanization since the Sino-Indian War in 1962. Born in Qingtian, southeastern China, Xu Xiaoxiao survived a major flood disaster in Wenzhou China in 1994. Moving to the Netherlands at a young age, Xu's diasporic experience informs the ways she takes part in, observes, and captures the world she inhabits. Crossing borders frequently in the real world, Xu seized the elasticity of her insider-outsider role between cultures, whose oeuvre blurs the boundaries between documentary and autonomous work.

Chuqi Min (闵楚齐 she/her) is a PhD student in art history at Rice University. She is interested in the art of women/queer persons-in-diaspora from the Global Majority during the modern and post-modern periods, as well as transnational/transcultural (queer) visual culture of East Asia. Chuqi coined “Sinofemcentrism,” emphasizing a decolonial, Sino-feminist-centered art historical practice that is grounded in the recognition of plurality, hybridity, locality, and cultural specificity of feminisms.

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Mar 8th, 1:31 AM

Quiet Resilience: Alternative Modernity in Xu Xiaoxiao's "Ki Ki So So Lhargyalo"

This essay focuses on contemporary Chinese photographer Xu Xiaoxiao's interpretation and representation of the kinship and estrangement between body and landscape, modernity and heritage, culture and nature. In her most recent series of work titled “Ki Ki So So Lhar Gyalo,” Xu explores the nuanced entanglement between the people of Ladakhi (located in the far north of India, a land of rich Tibetan Buddhist tradition and cultural diversity) and its fast evolving environment due to challenges posted by military expansion, policy shifts, tourism, and urbanization since the Sino-Indian War in 1962. Born in Qingtian, southeastern China, Xu Xiaoxiao survived a major flood disaster in Wenzhou China in 1994. Moving to the Netherlands at a young age, Xu's diasporic experience informs the ways she takes part in, observes, and captures the world she inhabits. Crossing borders frequently in the real world, Xu seized the elasticity of her insider-outsider role between cultures, whose oeuvre blurs the boundaries between documentary and autonomous work.

Chuqi Min (闵楚齐 she/her) is a PhD student in art history at Rice University. She is interested in the art of women/queer persons-in-diaspora from the Global Majority during the modern and post-modern periods, as well as transnational/transcultural (queer) visual culture of East Asia. Chuqi coined “Sinofemcentrism,” emphasizing a decolonial, Sino-feminist-centered art historical practice that is grounded in the recognition of plurality, hybridity, locality, and cultural specificity of feminisms.