Ziyi Xiong’s curatorial focus takes as its subject the liminal intersection of presence and absence, the encounter of the spiritual and the material, the ephemeral and the transcendent. Through her multidisciplinary background in Art Management and Policy Practice, Xiong approaches the exhibition space as an immersive lived experience that not only relies on the emotional and conceptual resonance of the works on display, but engages the body, and its trace.
As a curator, Xiong cultivates close collaborations with artists, foregrounding their sensitivity, as well as the audience’s. Indeed, she refrains from employing normative tools of exposition (wall texts, thematic signposting, or institutional framing devices), favouring individual interpretation over didactic intervention, to stir a visceral, more immediate engagement with the artworks. Her approach draws on Roland Barthes’s notion of the “writerly text”, in which the reader is part of the meaning-making process.
熊梓伊的策展關注點聚焦於在場與缺席的閾限交匯、精神與物質的相遇、短暫與超越的對話。憑藉其藝術管理與政策實踐的多學科背景，她將展覽空間視為一種沉浸式的生活體驗，這種體驗不僅依賴於展出作品的情感與概念共振，更關乎身體的參與及其痕跡的留存。
作為策展人，熊梓伊致力於與藝術家建立緊密合作，同時凸顯藝術家與觀眾的雙重敏感性。她刻意避免使用傳統的闡釋工具（如牆面文字、主題標識或機構框架裝置），轉而推崇個體化的解讀而非說教式干預，以此激發觀者與藝術品之間更為本能、直接的對話。這種方法借鑒了羅蘭·巴特提出的「可寫文本」理念，即讀者成為意義生成過程的參與者。
“ArtEvol 2025: Voices from the Undefined” Exhibition view at Saatchi Gallery, 2025. Courtesy of the curator.
Xiong is currently working on the production of ‘ArtEvol 2025: Voices from the Undefined’, a major group exhibition at Saatchi Gallery, London, featuring over fifty international artists—a project which attests to her keen interest in cultural diversity and multiplicity. Most recently, she curated ‘The Thin Place’ at Apsara Studio, a solo show by Zesheng Li, whose contemplative photographs of open fields, pilgrimage routes, of doors and windows as thresholds, and still landscapes blanketed by fog, place the visible vis-à-vis the invisible, and decelerate time.
熊梓伊目前正在進行倫敦薩奇畫廊大型群展《ArtEvol 2025: Voices from the Undefined》的策劃工作，匯集逾五十位國際藝術家，這一項目展現了她對文化多樣性與多元性的深切關注。近期她在Apsara Studio策劃的《The Thin Place》個展，呈現了Zesheng Li的沉思性攝影作品。藝術家通過對曠野、朝聖之路、作為閾限的門窗以及霧靄籠罩的寂靜景觀的捕捉，使可見與不可見相互映照，讓時間得以放緩流速。
“The Thin Place” Exhibition view, 2025. Courtesy of the curator.
Time, no longer linear, but fluid, subjective—Bergsonian—is the subject of ‘Of Self, Time, and Trembling Silence’ by Zhengwei Fan at Batsford Gallery. Here, through the juxtaposition of different registers, Xiong’s curation abandons visual consistency, leaving space for free semantic proliferation instead. Earlier this year, ‘From Breath to the Dirt’ at 1215 Gallery in Montreal, Canada, brought together seven emerging artists to reflect on themes of isolation, solitude, and ecological transformation.
在Batsford畫廊的《Of Self, Time, and Trembling Silence》展覽中，樊征偉以柏格森式的時間觀為線索，將時間呈現為非線性、流動而主觀的存在。熊梓伊通過不同表現層次的並置，放棄視覺一致性，為語義的自由增殖留出空間。今年早些時候，她在加拿大蒙特利爾1215畫廊策劃的《From Breath to the Dirt》匯集七位新銳藝術家，共同探討隔離、孤寂與生態轉型等主題。
“From Breath to the Dirt” Exhibition view at the 1215 Gallery, 2025. Courtesy of the curator.
Xiong’s practice is informed by both Eastern and Western influences. She works in Mandarin and English, which confers a global perspective to her approach. In 2023, she conceptualized and executed ‘Ceramics Connection’ at Kunming City Museum, China, a cross-regional exhibition aimed at showcasing the ceramic heritage of the ancient cities of Jingdezhen and Jianshui.
熊梓伊的策展實踐融匯東西方文化影響。她以中英雙語工作，賦予其策展方法全球性視野。2023年，她在昆明市博物館構想並實施的《Ceramics Connection》跨區域展覽，旨在展現景德鎮與建水古城的陶瓷遺產。
Portrait of Ziyi Xiong
From 2018 to 2021, the London-based curator worked as a lecturer at the School of Fine Arts and Design, in Kunming, delivering courses on “Apparel Technology” and “History of Chinese and Western Costume”. Such academic expertise continues to shape her curatorial activity through dialectic inquiry and philosophical investigation. Ziyi Xiong’s emerging voice in the world of art curation is ushering contemporary explorations of time, memory, the human fleeting presence—critically, yet subtly.
2018至2021年間，這位常駐倫敦的策展人曾任教於昆明美術與設計學院，開設「服裝工藝」與「中西服裝史」課程。這種學術專業背景通過辯證思考與哲學探究持續塑造著她的策展實踐。熊梓伊在藝術策展領域新興的聲音，正以批判而微妙的方式引領著對時間、記憶與人類短暫存在的當代探索。
Text By Annalisa Giacinti
Published on 29th Sep 2025
