Echoes of Her Blade / YUKE XIAO
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Opening Times 10am - 6pm
Yuke Xiao is a Chinese-born, London-based visual artist and fine art photographer. Working primarily with analogue photography, she explores how memory, place, and feminine strength shape our emotional connection to space. Her practice draws deeply from lived experience, guided by a grounded yet intuitive visual sensibility.
With a background in spatial design, Yuke constructs images that are both staged and intimately personal. Her work is shaped by a distinctly female perspective and often uses light, atmosphere, and modest props to reframe everyday environments. Rather than documenting what is, she uses photography to imagine what might still be hidden or felt within a place or body.
Her major projects include 3AM Reveries, a visual exploration of solitary rituals in late-night domestic spaces; From Her Step to My Eyes, a cross-generational film photography series weaving together her life in London with her mother’s in China; and The Han River Never Sleeps and Breathing City, tributes to the vibrant nighttime life along Chinese urban riversides.
Her solo exhibition Echoes of Her Blade at London’s Coningsby Gallery is a collaboration with her 80-year-old grandmother, who once trained in Tai Chi sword but gave it up for decades of family caregiving. In this body of work, Yuke transforms their home into a performance space. Her grandmother moves through familiar rooms in her old training clothes, shaped by a lifetime of labor and care. Through shared authorship and intentional staging, the project explores how strength and sacrifice are passed down across generations, especially among women.
Yuke’s work has been exhibited internationally in cities including London, Glasgow, Berlin, Budapest, and Portland. Her photography has been recognized by the IPA Official Selection, the BBA One Shot Award Shortlist, and the Women in Art Prize Longlist. She is continuing to develop her fine art photography career in the UK.
Across all her work, Yuke investigates how personal histories live on in space, light, and daily routines. She uses photography as a way of listening—to what remains, to what shaped us, and to what still quietly asks to be seen.
This exhibition began with a sense of return. Alongside recent photographs, it includes family images of my grandmother practicing Tai Chi sword as a young woman, before setting it aside to care for generations of family. Now in her eighties, she moves once more through familiar and open spaces, guided by memory and strength. Eight new photographs are framed in window boxes, inviting viewers to open them and engage. Through gesture, light, and space, we created images that speak to feminine resilience, intergenerational memory, and quiet strength. This is not just her portrait. It is a tribute to bodies that remember, and to the power passed down through women’s hands and care.