Zhuo Xiong works across painting, film, and object-making, examining how land, labor, memory, and personal history shape the formation of identity. Rooted in his early life in Inner Mongolia and later shaped by his experiences at the Royal College of Art and in New York, his practice moves between lived experience and material transformation.

His recent work begins with a return to the semi-pastoral, semi-agricultural land where he was born. Rather than treating land as a backdrop or symbol of origin, Zhuo approaches it as an active force: a structure that produces bodies, habits, attachments, fears, and divergent lives. Through documentary observation, painting, and altered rural objects, he traces the distance between those who remain bound to labor for survival and those who leave, return, and translate that inherited life into form.

Materials such as felt, casein, rope, thread, mineral pigments, discarded farm tools, and domestic objects recur throughout his work. These materials carry traces of use, pressure, repair, and fatigue. In his paintings and object-based works, the surface is often stitched, wrapped, ruptured, patched, or attached to objects marked by labor. Painting becomes less a window than a physical site where memory, damage, and inheritance are held.

Zhuo’s practice does not seek reconciliation with the past. Instead, it remains within the unresolved distance between origin and departure, survival and interpretation, body and land. His work transforms personal history into a broader inquiry into how lives are shaped by the conditions they inherit, and how art can return to those conditions without simplifying, romanticizing, or escaping them.