I. MERGING THE MICROSCOPIC AND THE INFINITE: CONNECTING THE HUMAN BODY TO COSMIC SYSTEMS/
My work orientates around this axiom: the human form and the wider cosmos exist as a singular system in flux.
In my studio practice, I explore specific branches of wisdom traditions from my Chinese ancestry – Taoism & Buddhism. These philosophies convey the microcosm is inherently connected to the macrocosm, and vice-versa. The universe is connected across all scales simultaneously: from intracellular processes to the rotation of galaxies, to our conscious experience. The body is attuned to the cosmic.
Before I touch the canvas, I cultivate a state of liminality through meditation. Without breaking trance, I register these states onto canvas through spontaneous, embodied movements. When I paint, I’m exploring that singular pulse that animates me from within and simultaneously across stellar systems, through spontaneous motion. The act of translating the vast cosmological through the physical body turns the canvas into a ritual liminal space where these scales of existence collapse into one another.
This is also a material process: I work with natural indigo, lapis lazuli, bronze, and earth ochres - elemental, mineral, vegetal, substances born from a union of atmospheric conditions and carnal soil. Using these pigments is a symbolic act: I am physically painting with the earthly to represent the celestial.
II. THE BODY AS CELESTIAL INTERFACE WITHIN PAINTING PROCESSES
I am exploring painting as a form of somatic research. The interface is my own body in motion during the act of creation. I don’t see my work as 'painting a picture' in the conventional sense; rather, it is an indexical recording of a physical presence moving through space within a wider system. Like a seismograph capturing vibrations. Every mark on the canvas are the data of that interface, the physical record of the cosmos expressing itself through the human soma.
I am fascinated by universal laws and geometric constants that have self-similarity across biological and cosmological scales - where branching patterns of our neural pathways echo cosmic super-filaments. The biomechanical curvature of a human limb in motion echoes the sweeping gravitational curves that dictate the path of a star. Though distinct phenomena, they are morphologically resonant, both governed by an underlying geometric logic that I explore through my movement.
When I start a painting, I mark-make with my whole body, allowing the natural ratio of my limbs to dictate the composition on the canvas. I am treating my own range of motion as a physical manifestation of universal laws. It is a dance between human chaos and cosmic precision. A process where the body becomes a doorway ‘into’ the universe, not merely as an observer, but as a biological microcosm of its fundamental laws.
“As Above, So Below.”
III. RITUAL AND SOMATIC PRACTICES TO ACCESS EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE IN ART-MAKING
Mark making from within ritual and somatic practices allow me to access a deeper, cohesive form of embodied knowledge. This is a way of knowing that bypasses purely intellectual logic - a knowledge that arises from the body’s own intelligence. Some call it a flow state, a sense of being in contact with a vast, organismic force.
By engaging in ritual mark-making, I endeavor to translate these states of interconnectedness to wider cosmological systems through the carnality of my body. I’ve spent a fair portion of my life in a kind of ‘pilgrimage’ to geological and archeological sites thought to hold significance, engaging in somatic research, understanding my bodily response to vast scales of nature and how they can be translated unto canvas through the use of pigments.
These investigations have significantly impacted my work, expressing in my ability to translate inner sensations from vast stimuli through mark-making.
Through years of engaging in this repeated of research - I’ve begun to realize that the 'sacred' isn't something 'out there’. It is the raw elegance of the prima materia, the basic building blocks of reality, pulsing directly within us.
IV. RESEARCHING BIOLOGICAL AND COSMIC CREATION PARALLELS
Whether we are looking at the delicate surface of a human cell or the massive edge of a black hole, we are seeing matter respond to invisible laws: tension, gravity, and balance, and the underlying architecture of natural form. The human body mirrors the wider universes’ structural knowledge. We are part of this unified flow.
When we look out at the stars and spinning galaxies we are also looking deeper into our own nature. You can see this symmetry in the most fundamental acts of creation and destruction: the way a biological cell divides (mitosis) under a microscope looks almost identical to the gravitational tidal tails formed when two galaxies collide and merge. Though the scales are billions of light-years apart, they both follow a shared structural logic.
V. EMBODIED, SACRED ART IN CONTEMPORARY CONTEXTS: AN ACT OF RESISTANCE THAT SHAKES US AWAKE
It feels like the world is growing increasingly fragmented and digitized, there seems to be a decoupling from the natural and the sacred. I believe that Art holds the ability to re-orientate us, to shake us awake and break through our collective numbness. Art re-establishes our relational interdependence with our Self, the Earth, and a wider cosmological system - reclaiming our place and belonging within it.
We are integral components of a monumental and changing universe: our internal landscape exists in in unbroken flow with the cosmological. There is a natural intelligence living within our body. Here, we find our agency and sovereignty to act and to create with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.
It will not look like what the old books tell.
It will arise as a new holiness moulded for these times.
It will be re-formed through our own hands, hearts and lands.
We think it desecrated through wars, conflicts, famines and deaths.
So we must consecrate again and again.
It will be innocence re-drawn.
It will be the Heart taking precedence.
It will be the body’s sovereignty reinstated.
Rush, scattering of focus, of attention,
now met with slow, deep, ritualized living.
The reclamation of the substance of life.
The medicine to Paralysis through Surrendering into
becoming the current that changes itself.
Animating the dead world with our life-force.
No ikons of old.
Instead, a huge current. Faceless.
Something like blind faith ferociously adapting to changing times.
A big bang turned in on itself.
We create our own manifestoes,
we reclaim sacredness before the angel of Death.
Anthea Xin
Blind faith ferociously adapting to changing times.