Xin Lian
From Skin to Skin, 6, 2025
Mixed Media on Antique Goat Parchment
14 x 16 inches
 
I engage with art-making through the investigation of the dualities of care and repair—the pursuit of restorative endpoints that can also act as complex sites of adaptability, erasure, and inherent violence.
Working primarily through drawing and tactile manipulation, my practice employs imprinting and embedding as methods of binding time, ensuring that damage, labor, and presence remain materially persistent rather than resolved. In the moment when stitches and patches are not gestures of closure but
a refusal of it, damage becomes a state that is active and ongoing. Through cutting, suturing, and staining, I treat the hide as both a witness and a body which reveals the physical and emotional costs embedded in the act of repair that demand erasure and disappearance.