Xu Ziyang's practice returns us to what cross-cultural curating so rarely is: a long, slow, trust-based conversation.

"The studio is not a neutral space—it's a site of labor, precarity, and politics. To curate from the studio is to engage with the conditions of production, not just the product.” Hito Steyerl critiques the art world's extractive tendencies and the pervasive discourse on cross-cultural practices. In Ziyan Xu’s work as a curator and gallerist, she embodies this understanding, insisting on a studio-based approach that prioritises the 'lived context' of artworks. Working across China, the United Kingdom and Europe, Xu's conceptual framework is grounded in the inherent necessity of recognising where artworks originate, the artists' particular stories, and the unique characteristics of each artist in response to the exhibition's curatorial narratives. With a curatorial practice that is nomadic in method, Xu navigates the complex and sensitive lines between cross-cultural concepts, making accessible Western conceptual lines of inquiry to Chinese viewers and presenting Eastern traditional practice to the European audience. Through this, Xu's practice creates something very particular: a network of lived experiences.

Defining herself as a cross-cultural curator, Xu's curatorial narratives strongly assert that good artworks come from real experiences, aiming to create a deeper-rooted comprehension in order to provoke emotions so that viewers can not only feel the cultural layers behind the work but also gain a deeper awareness across different cultures. Because cross-culture, for this curator, is not just a clean, beautifully wrapped concept; it's not styles, motifs, or colours; it's the artist's background, their lives between cultures, and how those lived experiences become translated in the studio into form, material, and concept.

Literally deconstructing the way most galleries and curators work nowadays, before every exhibition, Xu visits the artist's studio several times, learns about their lives, residencies, and backgrounds, and discusses the work in person (not just through a screen) so she can make curatorial decisions that grow out of long-term conversations. She sees this as a way not only to make exhibitions that are faithful to the artist's reality, rather than a curatorial concept imposed from the outside in, but also as a way to build trust and respect between the artist and the curator.

The exhibition Blooming Dartmoor, held at Lian Art Museum in Hangzhou, brings together over 100 works by 18 artists from the UK, Greece, Italy, Singapore, and China. It is a perfect example of cross-cultural work, international networks, and educational approaches. The curatorial narrative focuses on the Buddhist concept of paramita (the other shore) and integrates the mythological landscape of Dartmoor Forest, exploring diasporic subjects' cultural memory and identity reconstruction. The spatial design features five zones, with eight interwoven wall panels and single-sided glazing arranged in a U-shape, with four floating walls suspended 30cm above ground. This creates visual permeability (when facing one wall, viewers could glimpse the next space), resulting in a layered, flowing experience as you move through the exhibition. In terms of exhibition narrative, there is a deliberate structure: the first room features Chinese artists working with traditional watercolour or ink on silk and paper, offering a familiar entry point for Chinese audiences, and then the later rooms are filled with increasingly experimental, cross-cultural works by London-based and mixed-background artists. There is a clear relationship between the exhibition’s conceptual framework and the participating artists. 

Even more, Xu extends her cross-cultural approach beyond the exhibition context by running education programmes linked to the show. She invites students to visit, organising and guiding discussions and introducing elements that foster a learning-based audience. There is also a quiet participative quality: some visitors touch the exhibited objects and patterns directly, while a more cautious audience asks for permission first. Xu guides these visitors from conceptual engagement to the physical experience.

Within the London context, one exhibition succinctly illustrates Xu's curatorial works. A Table Fable (2024) is a very particular kind of exhibition set in the curator's own apartment. Xu collaborated with multiple artists, including an Italian food artist, transforming the apartment into something else entirely: an installation, a mix of painting, sculpture, and food, designed for social and sensory interaction. By situating the exhibition within the familiar concept of home, Xu's methodology challenges our definitions of both home and exhibition. The result is a shift from the usually cold, distanced atmosphere of a gallery to an environment of shared intimacy and creativity. Food was the link between art and the audience, becoming a fusion of what Xu terms “effective friction: moments where different frameworks meet without premature resolution”. The Italian food artist created dishes that double as edible artworks, where guests experienced the exhibition through taste, touch, and smell. Every guest received a ceramic plate, which changed hands every five seconds, creating several unique collaborative plates, breaking the distance between the audience and art, and encouraging conversation and reflection. Through this interactive setting, Xu explores how people emotionally and socially respond when art is not something precious on the walls but instead is linked with food and play.

In terms of methodology, Xu runs a nomadic curatorial model, moving between different spaces and venues depending on the project, yet keeping a very specific curatorial message: "Most urgent conversations in contemporary art happen at the edges: between cultures, between languages, between structures of power that rarely acknowledge one another.” In close collaboration with XIMA Gallery (three spaces in China) and founder of Whiteshepherd Art in London, Xu facilitates dialogue between London artists and Chinese audiences through exhibitions, residencies, and art fairs, working with emerging artists whose practices resist easy categorisation. Within the London context, the curatorial narratives presented span multiple nationalities and backgrounds, showing a genuine cross-cultural practice, not a bridge, but rather a flexible, balanced, morphing dialogue of collaboration and understanding.

“We do not seek to build a bridge between East and West—a bridge implies symmetry that does not exist. We seek instead to create conditions for effective friction: moments where different aesthetic frameworks, viewing habits, and critical languages meet without being prematurely resolved. "Xu explains.

So what makes this curatorial practice so powerful? One answer might be that, being both a curator and a gallerist and a former artist herself, Xu has a very intimate understanding of what artists are, what they feel, what they think, and how they react to their own experiences and atmosphere. She also understands collectors and their responses. This dual understanding helps her communicate with artists and design exhibitions that speak to both local and international audiences, while also creating narratives that appeal to collectors and other curators. Another answer might be that, by creating exhibitions where the artworks truly speak of the artist's experiences (where there is a continuous line from the studio to the audience), where the architecture of the space is deeply curated, and where the choice of artist is very deliberate and, in some exhibitions, introducing a more interactive aspect to the shows, Xu constructs a far more interesting and layered contemporary understanding of what curatorial narratives are. The first quote from Hito Steyerl exemplifies cross-cultural work beautifully, and Ziyan Xu's work truly embodies it.

Know more about the curator's work here.

Cover Image:

The Exhibition Blooming Dartmoor. Image courtesy of Ziyan Xu.