Chunxiao Qu

My practice investigates how language structures experience, power and identity. Working across sculpture, installation, neon, painting, printmaking and text, I treat language not merely as a tool for communication but as a material system—one that can be bent, broken, misread or made visible in new forms.

I am interested in the intervals where meaning fails:
between what is said and what is meant;
between a phrase and its tone;
between institutional language and the lived realities it tries to contain.

Humour and conceptual play are central strategies in my work. They allow me to disarm or destabilise authoritative narratives by shifting their logic, rhythm or register. A sentence can become a trap, a mirror, a misdirection, or an architectural structure that redefines how the viewer occupies space. The recurring use of neon and text-based sculptural forms reflects my interest in what happens when

language detaches from the page and enters the physical world. In these works, words acquire weight and gravity; they become thresholds, objects, or sites of negotiation.

Across media, I examine how meaning is constructed, repeated, and undone. My practice moves between the intimate and the structural, tracing the ways in which individuals navigate the systems that name, classify and interpret them. Rather than offering clarity or resolution, my work sustains the instability of interpretation -inviting viewers into a space where certainty fractures and language becomes active, material and alive.