Ava Yikun Xu
MFA ’24 Fine Arts 2D
My work focuses on the female body as a living archive—one that holds memory, cultural instruction, desire, and silence. Instead of distancing the body through abstraction, I paint it closely: folds of skin, mouths, breasts, hands, and soft tissues that both reveal and protect. These intimate details become portraits of identity shaped not only by personal experience, but by the expectations placed onto women long before they speak for themselves.
As an Asian woman who has lived both inside and outside her cultural origin, I navigate two parallel systems of pressure. In my home culture, femininity is often defined by modesty, quiet endurance, and self-restraint. Outside of it, Asian women are frequently misread—hypervisible, exoticized, or reduced to stereotype. These opposing narratives create a constant negotiation between hiding and appearing, softness and self-defense, belonging and otherness.
Painting becomes a way to reclaim the body from those narratives. Through attentive observation and layered mark-making, I give space to what is often dismissed as “too much”: too emotional, too intimate, too fleshly, too direct. My work does not seek to resolve these contradictions. Instead, it lingers in that tension, where vulnerability becomes assertive, and where the body—seen on its own terms—can finally speak.
Ava (Yikun) Xu is a Boston- and Queens-based visual artist born in Chengdu, China. Working primarily in oil painting with mixed-media surface layering, she investigates identity, memory, and the politics of the Asian female body. Xu holds a BFA from RISD and an MFA from MassArt, and her work has been exhibited in New York, Paris, Beijing, and across the world.
