Mengxia Shi – Facilitator

Mengxia Shi is an artist, curator, currently pursuing a practice-based PhD Art and Social Practice at the University of Manchester. Her practice spans performance, installation, and video, with a strong focus on site-specificity, participation, and community engagement. Shi’s work explores how art can intervene in social and spatial contexts to foster dialogue, amplify marginalised voices, and build resilience through shared creative processes. She often works with minimal visual forms, sound, spatial rules, and site-responsive video installations to build collaborative encounters between the artist and participants. These interactions generate temporary collectives and open-ended processes that emphasise shared authorship and the shifting boundaries between artist and audience.

Studying, residency, and exhibition between multiple cities and cultures, Shi has developed a nomadic perspective that informs her artistic practice. She has lived in Guangzhou, New York, Shanghai, and Manchester. For her, art has been both a stabilising force and a tool for self-understanding, enabling her to navigate uncertainty, embrace failure, and cultivate resilience. These experiences have shaped her commitment to working collaboratively with diverse communities and to creating inclusive spaces for expression.

Free to Soar 

Free to Soar is a four-channel video installation based on performance documentation filmed in an urban village in Dongguan, China. The videos record a paper plane held aloft by a clothes pole as it moves through narrow gaps between densely built houses. Each of the four videos corresponds to one direction—front, back, left, and right—and is suspended from the ceiling, accompanied by spatial audio. Standing at the centre and looking upward, the viewer feels surrounded by a compressed architectural space. The work explores bodily experience and the fragile balance between restriction and freedom.