XU Qiuhan

Xu Qiuhan was born in 2000 in Shangqiu, Henan and received her BFA from the Oil Painting Department of Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in 2023. She is currently an MFA candidate at the Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts, specializing in Oil Painting under the supervision of Professor He Dan.

Xu’s artistic inspiration originates from her sustained contemplation of the Louvre sculpture Sleeping Hermaphroditus. Taking this classical image as a point of departure, she extends the ambiguous notion of androgyny into contemporary reflections on gender, identity, and desire.

Through restrained brushwork and a quiet, subdued palette, the body is stripped of its socialized labels and transformed into a pure vessel of emotion. For Xu, painting is not a transcription of external reality, but a process of inward self-healing. Within the breathing rhythms and subtle fissures of the pictorial surface, she seeks to apprehend inexpressible, latent feelings, thereby constructing an order of existence grounded in the individual’s inner experience.