An Xiaotong, born in Xi’an in 1971, currently works and lives in Paris and Beijing. Since 1993, she has participated in various exhibitions at home and abroad as an independent artist and curator. Over the years, she has continuously explored contemporary works and presentation methods in the contemporary cultural ecology. She has held and participated in many international solo and group exhibitions. At the same time, she has also implemented a series of works in public art institutions in different countries.

The work of An Xiaotong builds on a symptomatic phenomenon of our time: people’s connections on the internet.

New communicating mechanisms and concepts are replacing traditional means of communication; Simplicity of communication has on the one hand brought people closer together while simultaneously creating new distances. Life evolves between the virtual and the real worlds, with the former gradually replacing the latter and the concept of communication redefined by space and time.

From 2004, using images gleaned over the net: from web sites, blogs and chat rooms, An Xiaotong sets them free from the limitation of their formats and makes them her own. By enlarging these small pictures and by employing painting, the artist goes against the multiplication of images in our society and produces a unique work. An Xiaotong thereby immortalizes and exhibits people, whose status goes from being an anonymous lost into the pool of images available on the net to a celebrity that everyone in our star-obsessed society aspires to become.

Conceived as a single body of work, Where and When is exhibited in both “White Cube and Black box” and presents itself as a 360 degrees space crafted as a computer matrix where An Xiaotong has strategically placed her portraits of individuals.

After 2006, she presented the interaction between the artist’s individual experience and the visual language of the public space more in the form of installation. She cooperated with the Starwood Group on a 100% art project in hotel systems in more than 30 countries around the world. Presenting his own portal visual design concept, and in 2012, she cooperated with LE MERIDIEN’s hotel system in the residency cooperation project of Artist Journey.

In 2008, she founded her own artist design brand, ANXIAOTONG, which expresses a new fashion experience brought about by the indifference of personality in this era.

Since 2018, An Xiaotong has used traditional painting elements such as water, ink, rice paper and other traditional painting elements in the ancient scroll system of landscapes, but did not use drawing techniques to construct nearly sixty-meter-long landscape scrolls, which look like photographic negatives. , Presents a multi-layered landscape that looks like an idealized utopia, ruins after a catastrophe, or a phantom about to disappear in the form of imagery. Another possible identification showing the ebb and flow of the dimensionality of the work: the multi-related relationship between the work and the viewer is more interesting than the artist’s straightforward concept. An Xiaotong uses water, paper and ink to present a set of conceptual landscapes. In this group of landscapes, she used non-traditional ink and wash creative techniques, using paper with different ink shades and colors to make multi-level collages. In the process of collage, the picture of the traditional Chinese landscape system emerged. Without knowing it, it is difficult for the audience to find out the clues. If you get close to the work and observe it carefully, you can find the hidden pictures that are overlapped.