A desire to foster an open and permeable relationship with the viewer has seen curator and cultural researcher Xin Liu frame both artist and observer as expeditionist. In the exhibition Wanderer of the Earth at Sol de Paris Art Gallery in Spring, for example, our physical movement around the gallery space is intended to mirror the journey artist Wei Yixin takes us on across their surreal terrains.
Working alongside Nelson Qin as executive curator of Saatchi Gallery’s large-scale international group exhibition ‘ArtEvol 2026: A View From Everywhere’, Liu realises an ambition to elucidate pluralist creative expressions. The pair make sense of the impossible omniscience that the show’s title proposes, taking the challenge of boundlessness in their stride.
Curating is, of course, its own way of seeing: the works chosen and how they are arranged giving prominence to what we visitors –– bringing our own perspectives –– regard as important. With ‘ArtEvol’, Liu eschews the resolution of any universal point of view, placing many global artistic positions in dialogue with one another and asking what might arise when they meet.
Within this framework, Liu establishes her own domains of interest. Mounted on one of the gallery walls are works all dealing variously with structures of connectivity, and how they register within and upon bodies. In Emily Hana’s work in oil titled Moment (2025), a reaching figure is painted across shards of a sculptural structure, the physicality of their longing for connection coming into focus only as the viewer moves around the work. To its left, the microscopic diptych, Bee Nervous System (2026) by Andrea Abbatangelo is more anatomical in dealing with the theme; the mycelial sensory network of the pollinators body splayed in fleshy pinks.
An academic background in creative and cultural industries informs Liu’s integration of social observation and contemporary visual analysis to her curation. In the group exhibition ‘For a Little While’ which ran at Apsara Studio, London last month, the works chosen by Liu mostly spun around the lasting effects of memory and perception, but there was scope to consider the connotative relationships between technological media and perception too.
The scale of ‘ArtEvol’ affords Liu the space to take this inquiry further, examining how art reconstructs individual experience within a digitalised social environment. In the painting Human (2026) by Judy Clarkson for example, humanity’s uneasy fascination with AI and the notion of moulding our own adversary is represented in two figures; a naked woman bent over and caressing her blood red, humanoid clone.
