About

Xinhan Yú received his Master’s degree in Visual Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna in 2022. He currently lives and works in Bologna.

Yú works with video, installation, sculpture, and image-based media. His practice examines power structures and institutional violence, treating violence not as an isolated event but as an embedded systemic logic. Through technological, symbolic, and routinized mechanisms, his works investigate how power shapes subjectivity, memory, and behavior. Rough textures, humor, and bold forms of expression recur throughout his practice, alongside childhood imagery, public authority, internet culture, and video game systems.

His research begins with the ordinary visual forms through which systems of authority become familiar: uniforms, toys, police objects, public symbols, game mechanics, children’s spaces, family images, and low-resolution digital materials. These forms often appear harmless, functional, or playful. In Yú’s work, however, they become unstable carriers of discipline, memory, and control.

Rather than treating violence as a visible rupture, Yú approaches it as a condition that can be built into routine, language, entertainment, and image circulation. A toy may behave like a surveillance device. A game mechanic may become a model of obedience. A child’s body may reveal the early training of authority. A censored or politically charged image may return indirectly as a shape, color, object, or gesture.

Game engines are important to Yú’s practice not because they offer a virtual escape, but because they expose the structure of rules. NPC dialogue, scripted movement, loot drops, loops, death states, and simulated environments become ways of thinking about how behavior is organized. Within these systems, action is never entirely free. Time, value, movement, attention, and consequence are predetermined by an underlying logic. What can move, what can be read, what can be collected, and what must remain trapped are decided before the scene unfolds.

Childhood appears throughout Yú’s practice as an unstable political and emotional field. Playgrounds, toys, plush surfaces, cartoon figures, and child bodies are placed near weapons, uniforms, commands, and forms of public order. These combinations do not simply produce shock. They point to the ways discipline can begin before it is recognized as discipline. Innocence becomes difficult to separate from training; play becomes difficult to separate from control.

Childhood is not treated as a lost paradise, but as a site where family policy, collective memory, fear, fantasy, and institutional expectation can take soft, comic, or decorative forms. Yú also frequently works with public symbols after they have already been damaged, copied, emptied, or displaced. Police hats, tanks, uniforms, mascots, animal figures, and official-looking objects are removed from stable contexts and returned as props, toys, digital assets, or broken icons.

Their authority remains recognizable, but it no longer appears secure. This instability allows the works to examine how symbols continue to act even after they become absurd. The same logic extends to digital images. Low-resolution textures, rendering glitches, compressed surfaces, and awkward game-engine effects are not treated as failures to be corrected. They become part of the work’s material language.

𝙐𝙣-𝙥𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙤𝙙𝙞𝙘 𝙍𝙚𝙘𝙪𝙧𝙧𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚, curated by Purist Gallery, London, 2025

Radical Rest - Cinemā Ōniro, curated by Captain Daddi, Okay Space, Athens, 2025

Babele, curated by Lucrezia Nardi, Spazio Musa, Torino, 2025

Arte = Capitale, curated by Magazzeno Art Gallery, Ravenna, 2024 

The last off-site show on the Earth at Plague Space and Everywhere, curated by