Xuan Ye works across art, music, and technology.
Often through improvisation, computation, and fiction, X composes software, sounds, images, installations, editions, performances, and pedagogical experiments. X makes noise as a generative space to evoke the dissonant, untranslatable, and illegible pulses and pauses that make meaning stutter, systems tremble. Tuning into the occult resistance against the regimes of knowledge, X traces the paleocybernetics of technological, biological, and ecological systems through the development of a wave ontology where waves —material and metaphysical— become the language of porous existences, continuous and boundless in their emergence. Their work has appeared at the MOCA Toronto (2022), UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (2022, Shanghai), UQAM (Montreal) and Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), Peer to Space (2021, Berlin), MUTEK Montreal (2020), Vivid Projects (2019, Birmingham), and Goethe-Institut (2018, Beijing), among others.Their multifaceted practice has been featured and reviewed in Peripheral Review (2020), Canadian Art (Winter 2020), ArtAsiaPacific (Issue. 111), Goethe-Institut (Montreal), KUNSTFORUM International (Bd. 257), and Musicworks (Issue. 136). They were a digital artist-in-residence awarded by Pro Helvetia in 2023, a finalist of EQ Bank digital artist awards in 2018, and a recipient of grants and scholarships from Canada Councils for the Arts and the SSHRC. As a musician, X is techne agnostic and genre eclectic. They have performed at numerous experimental music festivals and DIY shows. Their LP xi xi 息息 (Halocline Trance, 2019) is an "intriguing debut album of disjointed, abstract computer music and free improv" (Boomkat). Their split-collab tape Breath Fractals released with Chik White (Notice Recordings, 2019) "draws on a vocabulary of shattered sonics, as if the pair had broken a musical window and pieced it back together in as many ways as they could imagine" (Bandcamp Daily - Best Experimental Albums). X is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo. + 300 words
2025
- bibliographyCharlene K. Lau, "Codebreak in the Waves: The Prismatic Practice of Xuan Ye," Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Issue 104 (March 2025): 59-66.
- releaseHow far would you take it?，Halocline Trance [compilation]
2024
- residencyImmersive Arts Residency, Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology, Zurich University of the Arts
- sympoisumEthics of AI Symposium, University of Waterloo
- exhibition4th Kamias Triennial
- writing"Smaller, Slower, Sloppier," DOI: https://doi.org/10.7273/xts3-rp44.
- bibliographyAngelique Ford, "Eating Language," Puja Journal, Issue 1 On Feeding (2024): 28.
- editionEveryLetterCyborg Bites [New York City][Toronto]
- exhibitionI OWNED, A TONGUE [images]