Zhilin Xu is an artist-filmmaker and a researcher based in London and Cambridge. Her research-led practice moves between the personal and the historical. She primarily works with moving images, while also moving in-between medias and materials from drawings to sculptures. In her practice, through material and filmic foldings, she often interweaves fiction and documentary to draw attention to neglected histories while also imagining their afterlives. She has a dedicated interest towards women’s, marginal communities’, and marginalised historical figures’ memories. Zhilin’s practice is informed by the concept of écriture feminine. She practices écriture across multiple mediums. It is an act shaped through a prism consisting a multitude of cultural perspectives: the combined result of her Chinese upbringing, her experience of growing up in the UK, and her encounter with French feminist texts. Also underlining her work is an attention to nature and the ideological frameworks of various cultural time-space.
“My approach follows the hope to derive experience of compassion from the injuries of history. I try to creatively and tentatively tread out paths that might depart from the experience of an East Asian woman, and, as she navigates through her own experience, the paths thread through the dense, spiky jungles of complex conflicts entangling race, religion, and community traumas. They diverge, converge and meet in the new landscapes of the in-between.”
Zhilin received a BA degree in Fine Art (first class) from Central Saint Martins in 2023 and her MPhil in Film and Screen Studies from the University of Cambridge in 2024. She is currently a researching artist at the Film and Screen Studies Department of the University of Cambridge. Zhilin is the recipient of the 2023 Central Saint Martin’s Graduate Award; her film installatioin Hiraeth (2023) is purchased and collected by the CSM museum. She is the recipient of the Global Undergraduate Award in Music, Film and Theatre from the European region. Her film Hiraeth: Outbound is the recipient of Experimental Film Remi Award at the 2025 WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival.
Her films and artworks have also been shortlisted for numerous awards from the Evening Standard Art Prize to LVMH/maison0 This Earth Award. Her works have been recently shown at Jesus Chapel at Jesus College, Cambridge; Factory Space, Zurich University of the Arts; La Chapelle des Beaux-arts de Paris, Paris; Cromwell Place Gallery, London; Koppel Project Space, London.
Contact: gracezhilinxu@gmail.com