View
Madé van Krimpen proudly presents VIEW, Xiaoxiao Xu’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.
The exhibition VIEW delves into Xiaoxiao’s perspective on landscapes. Using intentional emptiness as a gentle portal for viewers to immerse in the vast scenes she captures. She generously opens the entrance to the wonderland she discovered through her sensitive gaze. “It depends very much on the background and culture you’re from, what you see. It’s like in language: if people want to express their ideas quickly they talk in clichés. In order to prevent such clichés, I actually prefer silence to talking. In the same way, I like emptiness in images.” This conscious artistic decision adds an extra layer of intrigue to her work, challenging our perceptions and deepening our understanding of the relationship between the photographer, the landscape, and the cultural context.”
Xiaoxiao’s photographic view of the world is not a blocked wall to celebrate the artist’s ego, not a decorated curtain to entertain any, not a thematic stage for any clichés narratives to be picked up from the existing visual vocabulary.
Xiaoxiao's photographic view of the world is an invitation to explore, to connect, to live within. “It is in the unspoken moments, in the unwritten spaces, that I discover the subtle details that often go unnoticed. These are the moments I am looking for, the connection with history and the place that I want to capture and share through my lens.”
About the artist
Xiaoxiao Xu (1984, CN) was born in southeast Qingtian, China. As a teenager, she immigrated to the Netherlands and spending half her life here changed her view of China. As an artist, her work is very fluid and challenging to categorize as she is both an insider and an outsider. In her photography she chooses to shoot locations, people, and objects in a way that challenges viewers’ perceptions and succeeds in arousing confusion and conveying feelings of alienation. Undivorced from her personal history, in her work Xu, manages to create a comfortable balance between her origins and her present life. She graduated from the Photo Academy in Amsterdam in 2009.
Xiaoxiao Xu has been exhibited in several different exhibitions in Europe. And also in the Netherlands, for example in Museum Hilversum and Fotomuseum The Hague. Xiaoxiao Xu has published photobooks such as ‘Shooting the Tiger’ and ‘Watering My Horse by a Spring at the Foot of the Long Wall'. Xiaoxiao was the first artist that worked together when Madé van Krimpen gallery was still Multiplemade gallery. At the moment she has an exhibition in Switzerland “Human. Child." a collaboration between the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum Switzerland.
(Selected) Exhibitions
2023 ‘Human. Kind’ Red Cross Museum, CH
2023 ‘Life Along the Long Wall’ Fotomuseum, The Hague, NL
2021 ‘China dreams’, Museum Hilversum, NL
2021 ‘Best Photography Book Award’ PHotoESPAÑA, ES
2021 ‘Wenzhou’ FotoFestival Naarden’, NL
2021 ‘Photo Books’, Grassi museum of applied arts, Leipzig, DE
2020 ‘Jimei X Arles’, Xiamen China, BredaPhoto, NL
2019 ‘West East’, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Miland, IT
Books
2022 ‘Shooting the Tiger’
2020 ‘Watering My Horse by a Spring at the Foot of the Long Wall’
2016 ‘Aeronautics in the Backyard’
2014 ‘The way to the golden mountain’
