Xinyi Zhang

Visual Art, Photography, Craft · Emerging · Auckland, NZ

心怡Xinyi is a community-taught artist born in China. She spent several years in Chicago for study and work, and recently returned to New Zealand, where she is currently based in Auckland. Xinyi’s current ceramic work is mostly focused on small everyday objects that bring up memories of childhood and nature. She is primarily engaged with handbuilding and often transforms thrown pieces further by hand. In her practice, she values play, exploration, and a sense of freedom in the making process, allowing the work to bring out the qi (energy) that moves in line with natural rhythms. The other side of her work involves clay sculptures that ask philosophical questions around permanence and impermanence. She studied at the woodfired pottery school in New Lynn, Auckland, where she created open-formed vessels using local clay and left them unfired so they could reintegrate into nature over time. After that, she made a clay shoebox containing a found shoe and returned it to Long Bay Regional Park to weather naturally. Through these projects, she explores how seemingly contradictory concepts can coexist-clay returns to nature and becomes a permanent part of the landscape, while the traces of labor and human touch gradually disappear. And she would continue this exploration in her residency at Driving Creek this coming November. Xinyi previously worked more extensively with still-life photography, and she was admitted to the MFA in Studio Art at the School of Art Institute of Chicago with a New Artist Society Scholarship in 2025. Now she uses photography primarily as a way of documenting and interacting with her ceramic and clay pieces.