24 Nov 2025
Balancing Contradictions: Guan Xiao on Time, Technology, and the Spiritual Home
Interviewby Alexander Burenkov
"I don’t believe in the so-called idea of 'progress'. […] In fact, there is no absolute ‘better’; the term has long been bound up with capitalism, and today it even functions as a trap. So yes, my work questions and critiques it. Only 'change' is necessary, and I believe in the beauty that change brings."
Trained as a filmmaker, Guan Xiao approaches sculpture as a time-based medium — a vessel for experience rather than an inert object. Her works move between hand and machine, digital image and tactile substance, East and West, the archaic and the hypermodern. This oscillation between opposites defines a practice that consistently questions how perception and meaning are mediated, accelerated, and distorted in the post-digital condition.
In Teenager, her recent solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, Guan Xiao extends her long-standing investigation into the unstable thresholds between the natural and the artificial, the spiritual and the technological. The show unfolds as a constellation of nine large-scale sculptures cast from tree roots and merged with synthetic fur, aluminium, motorcycle parts, and decorative LED lights. Hovering between monumentality and absurdity, these hybrid forms evoke the restless energy of adolescence — what the artist calls an "ambiguous life stage" open to contradiction, self-doubt, and transformation. “Teenager”, she writes, "is a state of being: unresolved, fleeting yet intense."
The adolescent, for Guan, becomes a metaphor for a society suspended between belief and skepticism, progress and exhaustion. By materialising that tension in objects, she exposes the contradictions of a world shaped by technological acceleration and late capitalist promises of freedom. Her sculptures seem to inhabit multiple temporalities at once: they recall pre-modern ritual artefacts, industrial debris, and futuristic relics. In this sense, Guan’s art could be described as post-digital archaeology — it unearths the ways in which technology infiltrates even the most organic and spiritual aspects of existence, while also seeking to reclaim a space for slowness, contemplation, and embodied attention.
“Time”, she says, “is not a tangible entity; it’s a concept, more like an adjective”. For her, sculpture is a container of time — a site where the past and the future converge in the present. This understanding resonates with her ambivalence toward digital culture. Although her work reflects the logic of remix, sampling, and fragmentation characteristic of post-digital aesthetics, it also pushes back against their flatness. Guan Xiao’s practice is not about reproducing the effects of digital media, but about metabolising them into material form — bringing the virtual back to the tactile.
In Guan Xiao’s post-digital cosmology, the artist’s task is to rebuild a "spiritual home" amid the debris of information and capital. Her works open temporary shelters for perception — containers where contradiction, doubt, and transformation coexist. They remind us that in the flood of images and data, the only real time is the now.
Alexander Burenkov: Your sculptures often juxtapose organic and inorganic, ancient and futuristic. How do you think these anachronistic pairings shift the viewer’s sense of temporality? Do they suggest that the past, present, and future are not so discrete?
Guan Xiao: For me, time is not a tangible entity; it’s a concept, more like an adjective. I’d like to describe time as a pocket, a container, a measure. Sculpture is a kind of container, and so is video. What I present is that within the container of sculpture, aesthetics can break the definitions of time and culture, for example, combining Eastern and Western sensibilities, the simple and the ornate, the artificial and the natural. By using the balance that contradiction produces, I try to disrupt the subtle prompts that concepts impose on a viewer’s aesthetic perception. The past, present, and future have never been separate. There is only the now. The past and the future converge in the present. Our memories of the past and our imaginings of the future meet in consciousness now. We cannot live in the past or the future; we can only create in the present.
AB: In an earlier interview you’ve described stepping away from your phone in the studio as a kind of meditation, breaking away from the constant flow of the Internet. How does that detachment feed back into the making of works that are nevertheless deeply in conversation with mediated culture?
GX: I think the biggest problem we face today is that there are too many answers. We’re constantly being handed ways to solve problems and an abundance of choices, which leaves us with no time or energy to figure out what we actually need—what question we most truly want to ask. We used to talk about the Internet’s "information explosion," but only now—when the smartphone has become inseparable from daily life—do I really feel its effects. We don’t even have time to notice the explosion anymore. Every day we’re drawn to all kinds of juicy images and information; we think we’re in a high-adrenaline "brainstorm," when in fact, after the storm, the mind is just a rubble field. We become leaves swept away by a gale, losing our own place to stand.
In truth, each of us holds some answers within; you simply need to quiet yourself and filter out the noise to locate them. So stepping away from my phone in the studio is a way to win back time for thinking—to test things through practice, to discard the answers I don’t need, to keep eliminating and then deciding, until the decision I most need finally emerges.
AB: In your current impressive solo show Teenager at Kunsthalle Wien you speak of the "ambiguous life stage" of the teenager—open to change, uncertainty, self-doubt. How do the materials you have chosen for this exhibition (fur, aluminium, tree roots, motorcycle parts, etc.) concretely embody that ambiguity?
GX: I think this "ambiguity" comes from constant change—or rather, continual shifts: between doubt and belief, kindness and volatility, openness and closure. This is what I’ve called a "balance constructed out of contradictions." The contradictions appear throughout the exhibition. For instance, all the sculptures are heavy bronze castings, yet I use color to make them appear light—some even look plastic. That’s one contradiction. Another is the furry columns/"arms" paired with the cast-aluminum bananas below: the aluminum’s cold, flattened metallic grey contrasts with the warm, rich texture of the fur. Likewise, the structurally complex, entirely natural forms of tree roots are set against the structurally simple, entirely man-made industrial metal parts. And so on. These elements contradict each other not only conceptually but also in their materials and forms.
AB: Many works in Teenager revisit basic themes such as food, shelter, tradition, and spirituality. Why did you decide to foreground these basic needs at this moment, and how do they talk back to the conditions of capitalism and liberalism?
GX: I believe capitalism lures us with an idealized future, making us think that the more we possess, the happier we’ll be. But what if that isn’t true? The more things we own, the more time and energy we must expend—because we have to occupy and use them. And liberalism is not the same as freedom; it wears the mask of freedom while in practice serving as capitalism’s helpful partner—like a president and a vice president. True freedom begins with the "self," with being one’s own master. If, in moments of pain, we cannot stop the pain; if we cannot, by our own will, direct or release our attention, even govern our thoughts from instant to instant—how can we claim to be our own masters?
Today, capitalism is no longer satisfied with consuming material goods; it has begun to consume people, appropriating our life processes by digitizing everyday living. The feeling that one’s inner space—one’s spiritual home—is constantly slipping away makes me uneasy. So I started to observe what my own happiness is made of, as a way to resist this digitization. I wanted to return to the ground, to lived reality, and to look at life’s basic components: food, dwelling, shelter; care for memory and light; attention to killing, death, and birth. Under current conditions, how to protect the space of the individual’s spiritual home from encroachment is, to me, a pressing question.
AB: What role does scale play in Teenager? For example, the oversized eggs, cutlery, modular arms, etc. When you scale up or exaggerate certain everyday or foundational objects, what new associations or tensions emerge?
GX: Sometimes it’s to highlight and intensify a particular quality of an object. Sometimes it’s to create dramatic conflict; other times it’s to construct an environment.
AB: In Teenager, you use tree root forms, motorcycle parts, stylized cartoon-cloud scribbles, etc. Could you talk about how you determine what elements to combine? Is there a "logic of collage" you follow (associations, metaphors, contradictions)? How do you decide when a combination is resolved vs still in tension?
GX: At first, I chose elements simply by taste—I’m drawn to the force and friction that difference and contrast create. Back then, their entry into the sculpture felt like a collision: mechanical parts, electronic components, and so on. Later, building on that, I began to select things that could more directly alter the sculpture’s structure: a gooseneck work light; rope—as a "line"; a disc (an enlarged collar)—as a plane; nails—as points; a soft cap—as negative space.
The reason for pairing these elements with particular tree roots feels more like a bout of wrestling. In a talk, I once said that ever since I started working with tree roots, each piece has been a struggle between me and the material. I try different ways to tame its powerful natural qualities so that it enters the realm of art—through material contrasts, formal metaphors, and the like. Through mutual erosion and resistance, all the parts arrive at a balanced whole. When, as a whole, the work stands up as a sculpture—that’s the moment it is “resolved”. Otherwise, it remains in tension.
AB: In your video works, you have used found footage, internet imagery, collage, layering, and non-linear time. To what extent has this post-digital aesthetic or logic shaped your sculptural and installation practice?
GX: However you label it, this has already become our primary reality. My practice—whether video, sculpture, or installation—is built on that foundation. It’s like how many things are already decided when we’re born; it’s embedded deep in the flesh.
AB: Post-digital register in art is often thought of as about the ubiquity of digital mediation, the flattening of difference, or the blending of the virtual and the real. Do you consider your recent series as engaging with those concerns? If so, how? If not, where does your practice diverge?
GX: I don’t think this topic is entirely new; the names may change, but similar ideas have been circulating for a long time. Since the 1980s, the first generation of new-media artists has discussed it, and later the post-internet discourse took up related questions. Up to now—as I mentioned earlier—human life as a whole has become digitized. Its impact is long-term: what has already happened determines what will continue to happen, altering every aspect of society.
My work, in my view, is a result of how digitization has reshaped modes of making. So the concerns you raise can all find echoes in my practice. But I don’t address them through direct critique; rather, I try to guide them back toward lived reality—toward the original, the real. In that sense, you could say I’ve always been responding to these issues, and also that I’ve never been responding to them.
AB: How do you see the viewer moving through Teenager—physically, perceptually, emotionally? Are there intended paths, moments of disorientation, moments of pause, contrast? How much control vs openness do you allow in the exhibition space?
GX: I revised the display plan many times. I need viewers to see the works clearly. These are serious sculptures and paintings; I don’t want them to look like stage sets or props under tinted or dim lighting. I want viewers to be able to walk around them, to see every detail and color, to understand them. So I’m not aiming for a "conceptualized" exhibition, but rather one that expresses my understanding of objects and images. That is probably my only precondition.
Within that, my control lies mainly in how the space is used. I believe objects are the key that unlocks an exhibition space. If the space is merely an empty six-sided box, it does not become "architecture", nor a meaningful site. So I place works that open up the space—vertically (columns) or horizontally (a tunnel). Beyond that, in individual sculptures I want to convey a kind of "restlessness," a vibration tied to vitality. Around the vast, white, fur-covered house, they create a dramatic contrast in scale.
AB: The concept of "progress" is invoked in the show. What does "progress" mean to you nowadays: culturally, socially, technologically? Is it something you question, celebrate, critique — or all three? How is this negotiation shown in your recent exhibitions and series?
GX: I don’t believe in the so-called idea of “progress”. People usually take "progress" to mean “better”, right? But it’s a very slippery concept. The word comes from the Latin progressus, which originally meant simply "moving forward" or “a procession”. It was only in the 17th–18th centuries that the term was invested with the notion of history moving "toward the better"—think of major movements like the French Revolution and the American Revolution. Leaving aside the historical reasons for proposing "progress = better" in those contexts, it’s clear that when progress was endowed with the meaning of "better," it served political purposes.
In fact, there is no absolute "better"; the term has long been bound up with capitalism, and today it even functions as a trap. So yes, my work questions and critiques it. Only "change" is necessary, and I believe in the beauty that change brings.
AB: Post-digital culture often includes remix, sampling, glitch, and feedback loops. Do you see those modes in your work more now than before? Are there explicit references or hidden "glitches" in Teenager that relate to digital culture’s overload, repetition, and fragmentation?
GX: As I mentioned earlier, "post-digital" isn’t a brand-new idea—methods such as remix, sampling, glitch, and feedback loops have been in use for nearly fifty years. The "fragmentation" I often speak about in my practice—including the use of mixing and sampling—does partly stem from the nature of digitization itself, but it also comes from my own sense of lived reality, and my understanding of time and space. I’ve long used digital workflows to create works that, paradoxically, push back against digitization—so as to return to lived, real life.
AB: How might this body of work evolve? Are there aspects in the exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien that you feel open to pushing further or even contradicting in future works—especially with respect to materiality, narrative, or digital mediation?
GX: During the making of this exhibition, I realized there are many directions to develop, and that excites me. I want to present more fable-like sculptures—short pieces that read like stories. In terms of materials, I plan to continue working with faux fur, and I’m considering translating objects such as doors, fences, windows, or furniture into new materials for use in the work.
As for the main formal motif—the "tree root"—I’ll try some structural shifts: for instance, reversing the proportion between the root and other elements within a single piece, or cutting and reconfiguring the root into separate parts. After all, my engagement with this material is a long contest.
Regarding digital media, if conditions allow, I’m considering producing a new video.
BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.
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interview
14 Nov 2025
The Algorithmic Sublime: Ayoung Kim’s Cosmologies of Labor and Simulation
By Alexander Burenkov
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