b. 1983, Jilin Province, China. Geng Xue is a ceramicist and multimedia artist whose work spans sculpture, painting, film and installation. She studied sculpture at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), completing both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees under the mentorship of the celebrated artist Xu Bing. An exchange at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Germany broadened her practice into video production.
Geng’s practice centres on porcelain, a material she associates with transformation: pliable clay hardens into a substance both delicate and durable. She harnesses this duality by reimagining classical and religious narratives through ceramic figures and installations. Her stop‑motion film Mr. Sea (2014) transposes a tale from Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio into a cinematic world of porcelain, where a traveler’s amorous encounter with a serpent-like woman becomes a meditation on desire and danger. In subsequent “sculptural films,” including The Poetry of Michelangelo and The Name of Gold, she explores themes of reincarnation, trauma and faith. Critics have noted how these works fracture traditional blue‑and‑white porcelain by adding holes, tentacles and metamorphic forms, creating dreamlike tableaux that probe human appetite and fear.
Geng Xue’s distinctive blend of ceramic sculpture and moving image has gained her international attention. Her work has been shown at the Busan Biennale (2014), the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018) and the Chinese Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019)artsy.net. Public institutions such as the Princessehof National Museum of Ceramics, Berkeley Art Museum, Fundació Joan Miró and the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt have exhibited or acquired her workprincessehof.nl. In 2017 she was nominated for the Award of Art Chinaprincessehof.nl and that same year received the Blanc de Chine International Ceramic Art Award. Her installations and films have since entered the collections of CAFA Art Museum, the National Museum of Wales, Kwangju Art Museum and Seto City Art Museumprincessehof.nl.
In recent work, notably the series Ritual · Human · Artifact, Geng returns to primordial vessel forms. Embryonic figures emerge from clay surfaces, hinting at a lost connection between humanity, nature and the divine. Whether through stop‑motion animation or sculptural assemblages, her art asks how ancient myths resonate with contemporary experiences of memory, desire and spiritual upheaval.
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