Meet the Artist: Xinyue

Photographer / Visual Artist | London

Xinyue Tao is a London-based artist from Kunming. Her practice moves gently between photography, performance, and installation, exploring how time, memory, and light shape our perception of the self. Working primarily with analogue and alternative processes, she embraces slowness — allowing light to breathe, images to unfold, and moments to linger.

For Tracing the Tea: Light & Thread, Xinyue collaborated with HereThe to transform the ritual of tea into an exploration of perception and presence. Together, we reflected on how sensory experience — light passing through fabric, steam dissolving into air, threads soaking in tea dye — can become a form of embodied memory.

Throughout the process, she approached each gesture like a photographic exposure: observing how material absorbs, reflects, and remembers. The workshop became a living darkroom — where warmth replaced chemicals, and the act of making became an act of feeling.

The result was not just dyed fabric, but shared time: threads of conversation, traces of light, and a quiet understanding that art, like tea, unfolds slowly — one steep at a time.

Explore more of Xinyue’s work →