PALIMPSEST: WOMEN, TEXT, AND THE ACT OF SELF-INSCRIPTION
Artist & Works
Artist & Works
Xuyi Yao(Selicia)
Xuyi Yao (Selicia) is a cross-disciplinary multimedia digital artist based in London and Guangzhou. Her multidisciplinary practice spans moving image, fiction writing, VR games, and interactive installations, exploring the intersections of art, technology, and embodied experience. With a background in Computational Arts, she investigates the porous boundaries between virtuality and reality, examining how bodies—especially female and post-human forms—interact with systems of power, mythology, and code.
Drawing from feminist theory, cyber-mysticism, and science fiction, her work reimagines technologies of reproduction, communication, and resistance. Through speculative world-building and ritualistic interfaces, she creates alternate techno-spiritual realities where bodies become agents of disruption and transformation.
website:seliciaxuyiyao.cargo.site
ins:@seliciakuyuu
Cyberwitch Manifesto (2023)
Transparent paper printed, LED screen
Cyberwitch Manifesto is inspired by Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto. From the vantage of the cyber-witch, the work reimagines the entanglements among body, code and ritual.
Unfortunately (2025)
Lucky Cookies
unfortunately is a sculpture made from fortune cookies. While studying and working in the UK, the artist’s inbox filled with messages that began, “Unfortunately…”. It’s a fragile monument to misrecognition, precarity, and the labor of belonging.
Mycelium (2025)
Projector, Keyboard, Interactive Web
Mycelium is an interactive installation that records the words each visitor contributes during the exhibition. These utterances appear as nodes that branch and braid like fungal threads, linking strangers into a single, evolving mesh. Drawing on ecofeminist thought, the work treats connection as nourishment rather than extraction: communication becomes a more-than-human commons where messages feed, support, and reshape one another. As the network thickens, it models a sisterhood that is distributed, non-hierarchical, and resilient—closer to a forest’s underground mycorrhiza than to a social feed—inviting us to practice care, reciprocity, and attention.