Sal Xu

---

Bio

Sal Xu (b. 2003, Beijing) is an artist based between New York and Rhode Island. They received their BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design (2021–2025). Working mostly in installation, performance, sculpture, and image-making, Xu’s practice treat material as temporal and relational systems. Their installations pay close attention to the translucent and fragile connections of memories and past events, in search for an absent body. Through manipulation of perception and tentative metaphors, Xu's works examines abstract expression and power structure of time.

Statement

That windy city where I spent my childhood, people call it the city of kites. We spent countless weekends on the damp grass, sitting, watching, running along with those structures that fly. The air was always humid, warm, easing the slight pain in between my fingers for holding the reel too long. I was never a great pilot, they navigate and I follow. Sometimes I lose focus, letting that floating structure simply be an extension of myself, pinpointing half of me down on the earth, the other half wrapped in a wind too far to see clearly. Sometimes it trembles down through the far-stretching string back into my hand, beautiful vibrations, a private wind language. 

        As my family slowly transitioned out of poverty, we moved to Beijing, where people aren’t as enthusiastic with the kites. Though it was still common to look up and find one somewhere floating above, far enough that the strings are invisible. Why is it there, at this current moment? Occasionally, I chase that kite, walking across the city hoping to run into it, at least its anchor, its other half, what’s possibly holding it. But as I move, they move too. Between us there’s the wind again, much colder, opaque, translucent, completely invisible, yet connecting me to an answer that might be imagined. When the kites fall out of sight, where am I heading then?  

 My practice is driven by a persistent need to understand how time and memory operate as systems of order imposed on the body. I work from moments when those systems falter, during loss of consciousness, altered chemical states, or memory decline. Such conditions fracture imposed coherence, allowing one to temporarily exist outside measurable time and self. Through cast, translucent, and magnetic forms, I reconstruct such fragments of physiological experience. They stand as quiet structures that register inner disorientation molded by the pressures of institutional pacing and productivity demands.

Website: https://www.salxu.net

Instagram: 5al_pplex