Zhilin Xu is an artist-filmmaker and researcher based in London and Cambridge. Her research-led practice moves between the personal and the historical. Her practice has been characterised by the ‘in-between’.Taking her intercultural upbringing as a starting point (in-between British and Chinese cultures), her practice explores the regional specificities of postcolonial conditions, often through (re)discovering and (re)negotiating the archives of film history and colonial encounters.
“I move in-between medias and materials, from sculptures, drawings to lens-based adventures so to explore new ways for East Asian femininity and other marginalised historical memories to occupy space and time.”
In her expanded-cinematic practice, through material and filmic foldings, Zhilin interweaves fiction and documentary to draw attention to neglected histories, suppressed memories, while also imagining their afterlives. She has a dedicated interest towards women’s, marginal communities’, and marginalised historical figures’ and intercultrual travellers’ memories. Engaging with experimental non-linearity, both lyricism and choreographed movements are at heart to her filmic compositions.
“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