About - Siqi Xiong / Demi
My enthusiasm in Art and Education has long been built through my undergraduate studies in BA fine art at the University of Leeds. I have been involved with art since I was a junior school student in the UK, from studying painting, sculpture, design, photography and film & literature, to the art market and art history, this long journey of discovery has given me a sense of the profound impact art has left in the world and driven culture over the last hundred years. Influenced by my mother's mad love of art from a very young age, I have always been curious about different areas of art and have come to realise that it influences everything, everywhere. From typical national cultures, such as national costumes and cultural performances, to the surroundings of our lives. Art has both practical and aesthetic value, revealing different cultural, social, civilisational and spiritual meanings in different epochs. Art tells a story, just as the famous writer Neil Gaiman defines writing ---- Stories are metaphors for life, conveying the mysteries and the real truths of a story in an illusory way. The beauty of art, too, is that it is a vehicle for conveying ideas and emotions.
Due to my long-standing interest in curating and the contemporary art market, I have taken up art market and film as a major in addition to Fine Art at university, and I have a long-standing interest in curating and the contemporary art market, as I often go to exhibitions, read books and watch related video material. In addition, I experiment with different materials and concepts in my work, and my A-LEVEL studies in psychology have had a deep influence on my past and present artworks. I like to investigate human nature, thoughts and emotions, such as how the mind works, and then combine this with techniques such as photography and oil painting to produce a series of works. Through this theme, I began to focus on the workings of the human mind and memory: how emotions and events affect the mind and memory, and how the thoughts, feelings and perspectives of people with Alzheimer's or stroke can be portrayed through visual narratives. I have had the opportunity to interview and discuss the personalities of people with mental illness in order to inform my projects.
My photography allows me to show reflections of memory. By using the face as a canvas and shooting in low light, I am able to portray the anxiety and struggle of split personalities. I think there is a lot of scope for this theme and with the current wave of global integration the field of art is also heavily influenced and I was happy to explore the theme of cultural intermingling, so with a foundation in psychology, I began to fuse East and West through photography on camera, showing the combination of the art of body painting and the Chinese Peking Opera culture of face painting, which was the main artistic theme I focused on and studied during my university years. Some of my A-LEVEL work had the honour of being shortlisted for the Royal Academy exhibition, but due to exam board regulations at the time, I had to remove them from the selection process.