MARK.XU

About

About Mark

Mark Xu (b. 2002, China)

An curator working across installation and exhibition contexts.

The practice examines the relationship between objects, viewers, and systems of presentation, often engaging with participation, perception, and institutional frameworks.

Based in London, currently studying BA (Hons) Fine Art (Sculpture) at the University of the Arts London.

Personal background

Mark‘s early engagement with painting led to a shift towards spatial and installation-based practice.

His experience within the Chinese art examination system informs a critical position towards its standardised modes of evaluation.

Curatorial Project

Slide to view documentation →

Independent Exhibition, OCT-LOFT, Shenzhen, China, 2025

Curated and organised independently, bringing together artists with international backgrounds.

The exhibition was situated in a small-scale, non-gallery space, exploring how artworks function within everyday environments beyond conventional white cube settings.

Responsible for artist selection, spatial arrangement, and exhibition development.

Artworks

Slide to view documentation →

Office Table ,
Installation, 2026

Graduation Show, Camberwell College of Arts, London

Office Table transforms a familiar office desk into a fictional archival system where viewers encounter the procedures of institutional access rather than information itself. Organised through filing structures, administrative documents, and permission-based interactions, the installation invites audiences to navigate acts of requesting, waiting, and searching before access can be granted.

Rather than presenting institutional critique through direct statements, the work reconstructs the everyday mechanisms of bureaucracy as an experiential environment. Ordinary office materials become instruments that shape behaviour, revealing how authority is often exercised through procedures, documentation, and systems of permission. By placing viewers within this carefully constructed administrative setting, Office Table explores how institutional power is experienced through routine interactions rather than visible control.

Slide to view documentation →

Amendment No. 2025/001 ,

Installation, 2026

Southwark Park Galleries, London

A fictional institutional framework is constructed using legal language and spatial arrangement.
By controlling how the work is encountered, the installation shapes audience behaviour and highlights how authority is produced within exhibition contexts.

Slide to view documentation →

The Donation Box,

installation, 2025

The Copeland Gallery, London & Tokyo Open Art & Art on Loop, Tokyo

This work examines the act of donation as a form of self-confirmation.

Rather than engaging with where the money goes, the gesture of giving becomes an end in itself — a performance of generosity that remains largely detached from its consequences.

By placing the donation mechanism in relation to a toilet, the work redirects attention to the afterlife of money, questioning what is absorbed, where it goes, and how institutional structures operate beyond visibility. The collected money is then used to purchase a £12 McDonald’s meal.

Slide to view documentation →

The Paper Talk,

installation, 2024

Camberwell College of Arts, London

Installed within a toilet space on the 5th floor of Block A.

This work examines how meaning is shaped through context.

By placing toilet paper within a toilet space, it questions how value is assigned and how both object and environment are redefined through their framing.

“If toilet paper becomes an artwork, does the toilet become a gallery?”

Slide to view documentation →

Confession Mirror: Facing the True Self,

installation, 2024

London

The work can only be read through a mirror, where reversed text reveals words describing common personal flaws.

Bound by a heavy chain, the act of lifting the piece introduces physical resistance, suggesting that confronting one’s own shortcomings requires both effort and willingness.

Slide to view documentation →

The Laocoon,

painting & installation, 2024

A to B Gallery, Camberwell College of Art, London

This work approaches Laocoon through deconstruction, not to dismantle the image itself, but to question the conditions under which it appears as complete.

By dispersing the work across frame, sketch, and finished drawing, it unsettles the assumption of a unified image, foregrounding the instability of representation.

Rather than presenting a resolved form, the work exposes completion as a constructed state, where absence, fragment, and process remain active.