A tiny red paper boat rests in the fissure of an old wall in Aix-en-Provence. It is almost invisible, a fragile interruption in stone, yet once seen it cannot be forgotten. The photographic installations is part of Origin of the World (2016), one of several works by Chinese-born artist Xilun You, who uses symbolic imagery to probe the tension between personal experience and social structures, opening spaces where home, identity, and power are continually redefined.
The artist, who left China in 2014 to study at the École Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence before completing an MA at Central Saint Martins in London, speaks of these works not as definitive statements but as fragments. “I’m always trying to make visible the gap between places, between systems,” Xilun tells me. “That awkwardness is where things happen.” It is a formulation that recalls Homi Bhabha’s notion of the third space: neither origin nor destination, but the unstable hybrid zone in between.
Blonde LIN (video excerpt), single-channel video, 3'24", 2016. Courtesy the artist
This sense of in-betweenness permeates Xilun’s early videos. Blonde Lin (2016) re-edits a Chinese film alongside new footage, overlaying subtitles to invent a story of a woman who is sometimes a body, sometimes a wig, sometimes just an object. The work points obliquely to diasporic histories of Hong Kong and Shanghai in the 1980s and 1990s, but never directly documents them. “I didn’t want to reconstruct history,” Xilun explains. “I wanted to show how identity itself is written and rewritten.”
Well Dressed (performance still), performance, 3'10", Aix-en-Provence, France, 2016. Courtesy the artist
Well Dressed, Revisited (performance still), performance, 8'50", Lisbon, Portugal, 2024. Courtesy the artist
Performance and installation bring these concerns into lived space. Well Dressed (2016) marked an early attempt to negotiate visibility through clothing and gesture. Last year, Xilun revisited and re-created Well Dressed, Revisited(2024) in Lisbon, recording and performing a new iteration that extended these questions into a different cultural context. Modest in form yet quietly insistent, the work probes how the body is read across shifting situations, and how identity moves accordingly.
Origin of the World, colour print, 594 × 420 mm, Aix-en-Provence, France, 2016. Courtesy the artist
The red origami boat returns here as a kind of emblem. Origin of the World was prompted by the migrant crisis around the Mediterranean, but also by the artist’s own dislocation in France. The paper vessels, folded into cracks of ancient walls, are at once children’s toys, symbols of exile, and delicate stand-ins for the body. They embody what might be called a diasporic melancholy – not paralysing grief, but a lingering attachment to fragments, a refusal to smooth over cracks. Walter Benjamin warned that left-wing melancholy could be an attachment to failure, yet in Xilun’s case it feels more like a method: folding, repeating, recycling as acts of persistence. It is tempting to see in Xilun’s work a warning about identity politics, about the limits of belonging in an era of global displacement. Yet the works do not lecture. They dwell instead in uncertainty: the wig that hides and exposes, the threshold that blocks and permits, the boat that sails but does not move.
“You can never fully belong,” the artist concedes. “But you can create spaces in between.” The remark could serve as a key to the entire oeuvre. In the end, the paper boat remains lodged in its crack, precarious but insistent. It does not promise resolution, but it does ensure the fissure remains visible – a reminder that in-between spaces are not voids but sites where culture happens.
