He Xiangyu (1986, China) is an artist and film director who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Emerging from a generation of artists who have experienced the radical changes in China’s society reverberated within the economy and international relations, He Xiangyu’s art practice is based on his unique cultural experience. Using a diverse range of media from painting, sculpture, installation, video to publication, his work contemplates and echoes the fatalistic micro conflicts on specific individuals in a time of macro geopolitical and historical turbulence, through a series of projects with immense timespans and physical volumes. In He’s works, the deliberate dislocation of materials, intimate perception of physical and mental experience and the dispassionate historical perspective are brought into play; this very dynamic balance reflects the self-cognitive dilemma of a generation born from the historical fault line and its constant struggle with it. He analyzes and critiques the collision, ingesting and digesting of cultures with a non-linear structure.

He Xiangyu’s works have been shown in CAFA Art Museum, Beijing; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; TANK Shanghai; Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai; OCAT Institute, Shanghai; Para Site, Hong Kong; TOP Museum, Tokyo; The Drawing Center, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; Kadist Foundation, San Franciso; LACMA, Los Angeles; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin; among others. He Xiangyu’s works were also presented at the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art (Yekaterinburg, 2019); 58th La Biennale di Venezia, China Pavilion (2019); 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015); 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014); 5th Yokohama Triennale (2014); 8th Busan Biennale, Busan Museum of Art (2014). He Xiangyu was named as a finalist for the “Mario Merz Prize”(2021) and the “Future Generation Art Prize” (2014), won the 10th CCAA “Best Young Artist” Award (2016) and the “ARTNET Emerging Artist Prize” (2016). His recent interdisciplinary publication (published by Hatje Cantz, 2019) won the prize for “The Most Beautiful German Books” in 2020. He Xiangyu is the founder of the Asian Art Association (Asiatischer Künstlerverein) in Berlin.

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