BIO: Ziyun Xun is a visual artist based in Phoenix, Arizona. She grew up in Yantai, Shandong, and later lived in Beijing, China, before moving to Arizona in 2015. Xun received both her BFA and MFA in Painting and Drawing from the Herberger Institute School of Art at Arizona State University, completing her MFA in 2022. Working primarily with acrylic line–based abstractions, Xun builds up and subtracts layers of paint, incising lines into the thickened surface in a slow, quasi-sculptural process. This methodology examines existence and emptiness as perceptual phenomena—how forms emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure—through an “illusory visual” that prompts viewers to reconsider what they see and how they look. Her subjective systems of mark-making and abstraction stage conditions for direct, phenomenological engagement with the work.
STATEMENT: My work does not aim to convey fixed meanings or recognizable images. Instead, it is a residue of inner experience—an accumulation of shifting emotions, fleeting perceptions, and quiet uncertainties. Each piece is less a message than a moment, a trace left behind rather than a form to be grasped.
I believe that meaning does not reside within the artwork itself. It emerges only through the act of looking—through the viewer’s emotional, perceptual, and cognitive engagement. In this sense, the work exists not as a stable object, but as a process: fluctuating, relational, and always becoming.
The artwork remains suspended in potential until it is observed. It is this interaction—this collapse of ambiguity into presence—that gives the piece its momentary truth.
The pursuit of xiang—semblance, image, form—is not a search for clarity, but a reflection of our desire to recognize ourselves in what we see. And perhaps it is precisely in the moments when we fail to find meaning, when the image slips from our grasp, that art begins to reveal what lies beyond understanding.