Mari Xiao

is a multi-disciplinary artist,
focused on Production Design for moving images, incorporating Performance, Technology and New media.
Currently researching Sustainable practices and materials for production.
Based in Singapore and Chicago.

Reel 2023

Moving Images
Performance
Photography
Sustainable Studies

About + Contact
Instagram

About

Hi, I’m Mari

Mari Xiao is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Singapore and Chicago, with the focus in production design in music videos, commericals, experimental, and narrative films. Her personal art practice incorporates performance, technology and new media.

Currently a senior pursuing a B.F.A. in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Mari has diversified experience; ranging from choreographing and performing movements, designing sets and creating costumes, to curating and managing content for social media and galleries.

She has designed films such as “Albion Rose”, “Flight Risk”, “Crumb and Crust” and “Enchanted Roses”, “Paternal Synonym”, co-directed “Sleep is the Image of Death”, which received recognition from Miami Independent Film Festival, Independent Shorts Awards, IndieX Film Festival, New York Movie Awards and New York International Film Awards, Hollywood Gold Awards, Los Angeles Cinefest, FlickFair Festival, Milan Gold Awards, Florence Film Awards, Medusa Film Festival and Fullshot Cine Mag Fest.

Mari has also designed music videos such as “Superstar” by Nina Tech, “Beat of Love” and “Attraction” by Htet, “Bottom Line” by Inspecta Jones, and “Late Night Love” by Brian Dublin.

Commercially, she has worked on various design, commercial and social media projects from clients both in Chicago and Singapore. Notable clients include Senior Lifestyle Chicago, Alt.Native, Dynasties Antique & Art Gallery, and Chengdu restaurant.

Currently, she is experimenting in the fields of BioTech and BioArt, studying sustainable ways in art making and production, such as researching and producing new sustainable textiles and materials.

Resume + CV

Artist Statment

Softness is Hardcore. There’s weight to it.

I am a “third-culture” person, someone who grew up assuming a mixed identity influenced both by my parents' culture and the culture in which I was raised.

Straddling between multiple cultures, while not possessing a cultural identity of my own, I am in constant flux, see-sawing and stretching between different groups of people and places. The contradiction of familiarity and alienation, individuality and collectivity, belonging and rejection, feels like home to me.

It is in these liminal limbo states, where there is dissonance between cultural, social and political identity, that I find the body and space to be most malleable, negotiating and redefining themselves.

Consequently, I am fascinated by moving bodies and the conversations they have with their surroundings. I like to experiment, workshop and document these processes through collaborations with performers, informed by their own experiences, culture and heritage. I approach these investigations through a surrealist lens, letting bodies move naturally, relying on what already exists within the body and mind, and then mapping and retracing previous movements.

Bodily movements do not occur in vacuum, there is a topological aspect to it. I often investigate and combine the history and implications of the existing place these performances occur in, recontextualizing and personalizing the space, while acknowledging its past. In particular, I tend to work in polarizing spaces such as public and private spaces, virtual and physical spaces, rural and urban spaces, domestic and commercial spaces. By incorporating both physical and virtual augmentations on existing sites, such as staging props, projecting digital videos, and overlaying 3D generated imageries with AR experiences to, I reimagine what these spaces would be like and re-establish new rules to the status quo, warping and distorting the existing system and canon.