Xinhan Yú (b. 1996, Nanking, CHN)
Graduated in Pittura Arti Visive with a Master’s degree in Visual Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna in 2022. He currently lives and works in Bologna.
Xinhan Yú works with video, installation, and image-based media. His practice focuses on power structures and institutional violence, while maintaining a consistent preference for rough textures, humor, and provocative forms of expression.
The childhood imagery, public authority, internet pop culture, and video game systems run through his practice. He uses these elements to examine the tension between personal experience, collective memory, and technological structures.
Humor and absurdity often appear on the surface of his works. Rather than relying on direct critique or emotional release, he constructs systems that appear calm, repetitive, and internally consistent, revealing how power is continuously reproduced and sustained within everyday visual and technical frameworks.
Since 2022, he has increasingly used game engines as a central method for video work, developing a body of work defined by closed structures rather than linear narratives. These systems often get stuck in loops or states of stagnation, turning the act of viewing itself into an experience shaped and disciplined by the system. The elements within these works no longer function as stable symbols. Through repeated use and ongoing transformation, they lose fixed meaning and become materials that can be operated, organized, and consumed.
In this framework, violence does not appear in a dramatic form. Instead, it is normalized through repetition, procedures, and rules. His work uses mass culture to expose the cold logic of modern control.
Graduated in Pittura Arti Visive with a Master’s degree in Visual Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna in 2022. He currently lives and works in Bologna.
Xinhan Yú works with video, installation, and image-based media. His practice focuses on power structures and institutional violence, while maintaining a consistent preference for rough textures, humor, and provocative forms of expression.
The childhood imagery, public authority, internet pop culture, and video game systems run through his practice. He uses these elements to examine the tension between personal experience, collective memory, and technological structures.
Humor and absurdity often appear on the surface of his works. Rather than relying on direct critique or emotional release, he constructs systems that appear calm, repetitive, and internally consistent, revealing how power is continuously reproduced and sustained within everyday visual and technical frameworks.
Since 2022, he has increasingly used game engines as a central method for video work, developing a body of work defined by closed structures rather than linear narratives. These systems often get stuck in loops or states of stagnation, turning the act of viewing itself into an experience shaped and disciplined by the system. The elements within these works no longer function as stable symbols. Through repeated use and ongoing transformation, they lose fixed meaning and become materials that can be operated, organized, and consumed.
In this framework, violence does not appear in a dramatic form. Instead, it is normalized through repetition, procedures, and rules. His work uses mass culture to expose the cold logic of modern control.
