Yue Xu

Yue Xu is an object maker and contemporary jewellery artist. She has a background in silversmithing and completed her BA at Tsinghua University in Beijing. During this period, she joined in the exchange learning program at the National Taiwan University of the Arts and focused on metal craft making. In 2019, she began her Master’s at the Royal College of Art, in the meantime, she founded her own experimental jewellery brand, Sphinxy, in China.

Her work continues to have a particular focus on the relationship between objects and non-material existence, such as memory and emotion. She takes the making process as a meditation to record her feelings and thoughts about the present, she wants audiences to resonate with that moment. Her research on the relationship between materiality and immateriality gradually became her methodology of making.

Exhibitions

2015 Participation in the Fifth ‘Blasting’ Exhibition at Tsinghua University, Beijing

2016 Her work Self was part of the exhibition ‘First Handmade’, Department of Arts and Crafts, Tsinghua University, Beijing

2018 Her work Buried was shown in The Fourth New Crafts exhibition, Dhaka University, Bangladesh

2018 Her works Self, Lost, Silver Curving Decoration, were shown at the 2017-2018 Excellent Coursework Exhibition, Tsinghua University, Beijing

2019 Her work Lost was shown at the 2019 Tsinghua University graduation exhibition, Beijing

2020 Her work Lost was shown at ‘View and image’, Spain, Inditex and the Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University, Shanghai

2020 Her work Table Disappearing was shown at the Royal College of Art WIP Show, London

Yue’s project is about how we define the value of material and immaterial existence in this rapidly changing world, and how our values and standards have been distorted and re-constructed in the contemporary era.

Using transparent materials, she plays with the concept of using the material to represent the immaterial, and she seeks out new techniques or materials to move beyond solid pieces to discuss the topic of how we will adapt to this world where virtuality and immateriality are increasing more and more rapidly.

The human imagination is not a physical entity, but it plays an indispensable role in the operation of human society, and creates insurmountable disasters and conflict. Non-material things actually affect our material life. It is difficult to define the value of these non-material fictions: we pay for a story, for its symbolic value, rather than the entity itself.

In Yue’s work, elements like e-mail and e-books represent the trend towards immateriality. A Coca-Cola bottle, supreme brick for a thousand dollars, and diamonds all represent overrated symbolic values. The tulip symbolizes the collective imagination, the concept of monetary worth, and the values and standards created by human beings; after she had made the tulip she carved the bitcoin symbol to give a more direct association to the notion of fictional money. They are all fictions in a way: they are all representations of people’s consensus of value.

The bubble form is an ontological metaphor of disappearance, non-materiality, and inflation – these abstract bubble pieces can be understood as something that has mutated or inflated so much that we can’t even recognize the original form.