Xia Chengwei (b. 1994, Chengdu, Sichuan, China) is an artist currently living between London and China. She holds a BA in Architectural Studies with First Class Honours from the University of Hong Kong (2016), an MA in Fine Art (Painting Pathway) with Distinction from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (2022), and completed The Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School in 2023.

 

Rooted in non-linear time, embodied knowledge, and relational ways of understanding, Chengwei’s practice moves across writing, drawing, painting, and making. Her works often blur the lines between artistic creation and everyday labor, using materials as clues to weave together place, memory, and community. She sees painting and drawing as acts that access psychic realities and delve into deep inner landscapes. A key concern in her practice is feminine and care-based labor—acts of “knitting” and “growing” that hold the energies of the body and the passage of time in rhythms that resist capitalist acceleration.

 

Place is fundamental to Chengwei’s work. Born in a red-clay village in Sichuan, she draws inspiration from local agrarian life, ecological rhythms, and folk-shamanic beliefs. Her experience of otherness while living in London also feeds into her artistic inquiry. She is currently researching the salt-field ecosystem in Laoshi Village (Danzhou, Hainan), with the aim of nurturing an art and research space rooted in the local community while fostering translocal connections. She is also tracing family histories and disappearing knowledge systems in her hometown of Fangjiasi Village (Jianyang, Sichuan), gathering oral traditions and plant-based knowledge through drawing and writing as invocation. 

 

Chengwei perceives art as a slow, relational unfolding—less about representation than about co-presence, care, and cultivation.