About Holli Xue
Holli Xuē (b. 1996, they/them) is an artist filmmaker and visual storyteller who weaves subtle sentiments into lived reality, collecting evidence for the record of the uncelebrated. Their practice is based on moving images and sound, often consisting of constructed scenes, recorded performance, video clips from everyday life, and spoken narrations. Formerly a documentary maker, Holli blends the factual and the imagined, the seen and the unexpressed, examining the construction of identity narratives from within.
Things Happen Where You Don’t Look
In the intimate confines of a cluttered room, a blurry figure, Ishi Flatland, dances around the elegant furniture and decor, running after the camera lens. Acting as a guide for attention, the camera lens becomes a predator, exploiting the figure's desperate desire to be acknowledged while callously choosing to overlook. Ishi Flatland (Yabin in drag) is the last survivor of their race. From the 2D world to the 3D world, they have to imitate how people in the new world live, how to walk, talk, behave, and to adapt to the established rules of the new world. Playing with Yabin’s drag character (which originally grew out of a decolonising drag workshop held by Queer China UK), this visual narrative illuminates the pervasive neglect and biassed distribution of attention that have come to define our consumerist capitalist society, entwined with the existence and condition of queer bodies in mainstream depiction.
Exhibition
2024 Art Film Festival at Les Variétés, Marseille, France.
2024 Group exhibition Spilt Milk at VFDalston, London, UK.
2024 Artist moving-image programme Image Under the Ground as part of Queer East Festival at Ugly Duck, London, UK.
2024 Group exhibition Welcome to the UK at Ugly Duck, London, UK.
2023 Disability Pride Arts Fest at Make Studio, Baltimore, US.
2020 Mobile Film Festival, Online.
Things Happen Where You Don't Look