Where Light Unravels
Oil on canvas, 150 × 220 × 4 cm, 2025
 
Artwork Statement
My practice begins in stillness, at the threshold where the self dissolves and something quieter emerges. I work from the understanding that everything is in constant flux — the self, the world, and the fragile boundary between dream and waking.
Painting, for me, is not simply a form of expression but a mode of attention, parallel to meditation. Grounded in Buddhist non-duality and Daoist transformation, my work seeks to unsettle fixed identities, revealing instead a self that is permeable, contingent, and always becoming.
Through fragmented wood panels and canvas, I construct diffused, dreamlike faces where light operates as a threshold — entering, dissolving, and reconfiguring form. These fractured images do not represent rupture, but impermanence, tracing a process of continuous transformation.
Within Distributed Worlds, the work reflects on how consciousness itself is dispersed across cultural, philosophical, and perceptual systems. It offers a space of return — to stillness, sensation, and a way of knowing that exists beyond language.
 
Artist Bio
Anna Xiang is a China-born Australian painter whose practice is grounded in ancient Chinese philosophies of non-duality and the unity of body and mind. Currently pursuing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art following the completion of her Honours year at RMIT, her work interweaves Mahāyāna Buddhist and Daoist thought with phenomenological approaches to perception. Through fragmented surfaces and symbolic imagery, she constructs works that explore transformation, consciousness, and the fluidity of identity.