Xinyao Liu is an artist and researcher whose practice is grounded in sustained, embodied engagement with riverscapes shaped by extractive activities. Working across moving image, installation, sound, photography, performance and writing, she composes these media into durational encounters, through which art becomes a method of ecological inquiry and witnessing.

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Completed as a practice-based PhD at Chelsea College of Arts, her doctoral research, The Traces of Mining Activities in Riverscapes, examines contaminated rivers through a lyrical and performative art-based approach. Situated within a more-than-human feminist framework, the project develops the concept of embodied wetness and advances ritual and apology as rigorous artistic interventions for ecological awareness. Informed by decolonial, Indigenous and feminist theoretical framings, and attentive to Global South and Asian centred perspectives, the research proposes a guide for apologising to the river that can be activated across different geographical sites.

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Water has been the continuous thread of her practice. From domestic water and reflective surfaces to sea and river flows, she attends to moments of appearing and disappearing, to what becomes visible and what resists capture. Wary of symbolic uses of materials, she works with water as presence, process and relation. Through walking, listening, recording and small acts of attention, her recent work stays with rivers as plural living entities, inviting viewers to re-encounter the ordinary and to sense how identity, matter and responsibility remain in flux.