Chaohui Xie
Deterritorialisation and reterritoralisation 2025
steel, wood, Hebel blocks, wire
$POA
Through sculpture and installation, Chaohui Xie questions the complicated relationships between nationhood, migration, borders and citizenship. Her works are informed by the multiple temporal, geological and social trajectories that define place. Xie has recently created work for an evolving project using a collection of international coins gifted to her by the National Gallery of Victoria from their wishing well. For her, coins embody a country’s aspirations and reveal a nation’s identity. They also symbolise the human world by reflecting political-economic systems, recording historical figures and exposing socio-cultural landscapes.
Xie's sculpture Deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation is a wall structure constructed of 220 Hebel blocks with holes chiseled out. From a distance these indents appear like impact holes from ammunition, yet on closer inspection they reveal the borderlines of all the countries of the world. The concept of deterritoralisation emphasises breaking down the constraints of established jurisdiction from man-made boundaries. It is not simply imagining of a borderless world excluding territoriality, rather the phenomenon of deterritorialisation is inevitably accompanied by spatial reconstruction and reterritorialisation.
Deterritorialisation describes creation through change, a process where structure, deconstruction and restructuring creates new possibilities as original clearly defined and well-documented territorial divisions lose their authority through displacement and cross-border formations. This transformation process of constant generation and flux breaks fixed and static ideologies and creates an open field of new possibilities. Deterritorialisation and reterritoralisation is therefore concerned with liberating 'place' and bringing the near and far closer together.
Born in China, Xie moved to Australia in 2010 and is based in Melbourne. She completed a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (2017). Recent solo exhibitions and outdoor projects include Celebration of Years Exhibition, Art at Linden Gate Gallery (2019); and Moving Target, George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne (2016). Group exhibitions include Emanation, Project8 Gallery, Melbourne (2023); How to Build a Universe, Meat Market Stables, Melbourne (2021); Not Home, Sandbox Studio Gallery, Melbourne (2020); and Residue, Forty Five Downstairs, Melbourne (2019).
Images: Chaohui Xie, Deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation 2025, detail (top); Chaohui Xie (bottom). Courtesy the artist.
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