ECCPROJECTS #33

Open by appointment only

Captions of the exhibited artwork:
Xiao Zhiyu, Untitled, 2024, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm


Xiao Zhiyu (1995, China) lives and works in Helsinki.
“I paint almost exclusively from images captured on my iPhone. This small black box has become my device for memory and for sensing the world. Isn’t that strange? It represents the highest refinement of modern technology: millions of identical copies scattered across the planet, each one the endpoint of a vast, invisible mesh of extraction and production—rare earth minerals dug from the ground, labor outsourced across continents, container ships crossing oceans, patents, treaties, tax shelters, surveillance protocols. And yet, all this collapses into something so intimate I keep it in my pocket, fall asleep beside it, use it to remember my mother’s face, or the light through a train window.”
Xiao Zhiyu, 2025

Xiao Zhiyu recent activities include the group exhibition Dialogue at EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art (2025) and the solo exhibition Layered Hills Send Off Glimmering Light at the Helsinki Art Museum (2024). He holds an MFA from the University of the Arts Helsinki and was a participant at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2025. Represented by Galleria FuoriCampo.