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Shafei Xia was born in Shaoxing, China in 1989. She obtained her bachelor's degree in scenography from Chongqing University in 2012 and her master's degree in Visual Arts Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna (the Fine Arts Academy of Bologna) in 2020. She currently lives and works in Bologna, Italy. 

A conversation between Harriet Loffler, Director of The Women's Art Collection, and Shafei Xia in May 2026.

Harriet Loffler: Can you describe your work and the sort of source material you look to in its making?

Shafei Xia: Everything is the energy of life; everything is forgotten memories from my own process of growing up, lived experiences, and ancient perceptions that transcend personal experience. These are things that have always existed within me. By watching films, reading poetry and novels, or simply observing an ordinary moment in daily life, they can suddenly be awakened — and then the images grow naturally on their own. I rarely make detailed sketches, nor do I try to define an unfinished painting. Once the work is complete, the painting itself tells me what I have painted. The visual material I use mostly comes from screenshots of old films. I have always been drawn to old things: antique record players, worn red sofas, yellowed secondhand books. I am obsessed with the vanished aesthetics of past lives. I paint women gazing at themselves in mirrors, only to find a pig reflected back. Sometimes I paint dollhouses, inhabited by two pigs attempting to sneak into a neighbor’s home to steal. When I am sad, the image turns blue: a naked woman lies beside a leopard, tears streaming from the corners of her eyes, holding a candle shaped like a phallus. In the distance, several boats drift across the sea — some people rejoice while others grieve.

What I paint are the fragility, desire, loneliness, humor, and a fable-like absurdity within human emotion. To remain aware of pleasure even in sorrow — between lightness and heaviness, joy and grief flow together.

Harriet Loffler: Tigers recur throughout your paintings and ceramics – including the one at The Women’s Art Collection – but they often feel gentle rather than threatening, it seems to capture both power and tenderness. How do you use the tiger as a symbol?

Shafei Xia: I do not see the tiger as a symbol that is merely “used.” To me, it is more like a presence that has always accompanied my life — like a friend, a lover, and at times, an elder. We share joy together, and we endure suffering together as well. Sometimes it is gentle, sometimes tender and sweet, and sometimes dangerous and fierce. It is like a mirror, reflecting the shifting states of my inner world and my life at different moments in time.

Harriet Loffler: In an article on your work, the tiger was described as an ‘active principle’ in Chinese alchemical tradition. Do you consciously work with traditional symbolism, or do the meanings emerge more intuitively while you paint?

Shafei Xia: Rather than saying that I consciously chose to paint tigers, it feels more accurate to say that the tiger found me, and entered my paintings of its own accord. Most of the time, I do not begin by thinking about what it symbolizes. Instead, through the repeated act of painting it, I gradually become aware of an inexplicable connection between us. In some way, it reminds me of Zhuang Zhou’s story of the butterfly dream — it becomes impossible to tell whether I am painting the tiger, or the tiger is painting me.

Harriet Loffler: Do animals like pigs, turtles, fish, tigers represent specific emotional states for you or are they more like recurring actors in your dreamlike landscapes?

Shafei Xia: The turtles actually come from real experiences in my past life. There used to be many turtles downstairs from the apartment where I lived. They were like my neighbors — I saw them every day, and I even gave them names: Jack, Amanda…For me, fish represent a kind of freedom — the freedom to come and go at will. People often say that a fish’s memory lasts only one second, and about eight years ago, I painted a work in which, at the center of the canvas, stood a woman who had lost her flesh and body, leaving behind only a fish skeleton. On either side of her were two nude women with fish heads. In a way, the fish skeleton was one of the earliest symbolic images I ever created.

It speaks to how a woman, after experiencing the utmost sweetness, pain, and struggle in love, gradually loses her physical self until nothing remains but a fish skeleton. And yet, even beside that fish skeleton, there are still two voluptuous women dancing. To me, it feels like a silent form of encouragement and consolation exchanged between women.

I suddenly realized that my works are like a kind of fable — as if they knew before I did that certain things were destined to happen.

Harriet Loffler: Your work presents sexuality with humour, softness, and absurdity rather than shock. Why is playfulness important to how you depict desire?

Shafei Xia: There is a Chinese saying: “I contend with myself, and would rather remain myself.” In a way, I am simply playing with myself. Because within social discipline and most forms of daily life, we are required to remain rational. We are expected to be stable, restrained, clear-minded, efficient. But human desire is inherently irrational — it is chaotic, childish, fragile, and full of fantasy. So I want to approach desire through a sense of play. Perhaps it is a way of making something inherently heavy feel temporarily lighter. But lightness itself is never all that we truly seek. We are constantly oscillating between “lightness” and “weight.” Sometimes reality and the body feel unbearably heavy: time, relationships, loneliness, shame, social identity… these things are always with us.

But when we dance, when we are completely drunk, when we burst into laughter, when we make love — in those moments of play and abandon, it feels as though we briefly overcome time itself, escape gravity, and dissolve into the world around us. In that instant, the body and the soul seem to touch eternity. I hope that when people look at these works, they can temporarily let go of the need to be “correct.”

Life is but a theatrical dream.

Harriet Loffler: There’s often a tension in your work between innocence and eroticism – tiny figures playing, cakes, and flowers, then suddenly exposed bodies or explicit gestures. What interests you about that collision?

Shafei Xia: I have always felt as though I were a director inside my own kingdom. The collisions between innocence and eroticism, absurdity and vulnerability, are, first of all, a way of pleasing myself — or perhaps, of saving myself. Sometimes I stand alone in front of a painting and laugh foolishly, because the relationships I create between the figures, bodies, cakes, and animals contain something so childish, free, and absurd. So in a sense, I am also the audience of my own work. I amuse myself. There is a story in Zhuangzi that I deeply love: After his wife died, Huizi went to visit Zhuang Zhou, only to find him beating on a basin and singing.
Huizi was shocked and said, “How can you possibly behave like this?”
But what Zhuangzi meant was not, “I do not feel sorrow.”
Rather, he realized that life and death are themselves part of transformation.
If a person remains forever attached to how things must be, they become trapped by suffering instead.
So he chose to face the heaviest parts of life with an attitude that was almost playful, almost humorous.
I think there is a trace of that spirit in my work as well.

Harriet Loffler: Since your work has been acquired by The Women’s Art Collection through the Spirit Now London Acquisition Prize in 2024 the work sits in a collection devoted to women artists and women’s visibility. Does this context in which your work is shown change how you think about it?

Shafei Xia: On my birthday, the same year my work was acquired by the Women’s Art Collection, I painted a self-portrait: a nude woman lying on her back, a mischievous tiger in the right-hand corner, and between the woman’s breasts, once again, a candle shaped like a phallus. Looking back today, I realize that I have never truly wanted to be especially defined as a “female artist.” And yet beneath that surface, there has always existed a kind of invisible pressure — a long, subtle flame emerging from patriarchal structures. It is not always direct. Often, it has already entered into the way we look, the way we inhabit our bodies, and the ways we learn to doubt ourselves.
So entering a context like the Women’s Art Collection felt less like a symbolic achievement, and more like an opportunity to look at myself again from a different perspective. It made me realize that the things I once believed to be deeply private and purely intuitive were also connected to a broader female experience. But what truly changed the way I understand my work was not the fact of being collected itself. It was the trajectory of life and emotion arriving, at a certain moment, at a new crossroads. Experiences, desires, relationships, vulnerability, self-awareness — through the collision of all these things, the way I look at my own work slowly began to change.

Harriet Loffler: Your paintings and ceramics feel deeply connected, a continuation of the same dreamscape. How do ideas mitigate between the two media?

Shafei Xia: The paintings always come first, and the process of transforming them into ceramics is always accompanied by a sense of danger and excitement. Because ceramics are not a completely controllable medium.
They must go through two firings, and during that process, the colors, shapes, and surfaces continuously change. Sometimes they even crack, collapse, or become distorted. That unpredictability is something I deeply enjoy. And in a strange way, it feels meaningful to me that I paint on delicate, lightweight Chinese paper, only to transform those images into heavy ceramics — while both remain equally fragile and sensitive.

Harriet Loffler: You previously described the world as a circus, inspired by Charlie Chaplin and Federico Fellini. What do you think we can learn from these filmmakers and how to they influence your own practice?

Shafei Xia: They all understood too early that in this imperfect world, true humor is never about pleasing others — it is a way of survival. It is the ability to keep dancing, keep dreaming, keep loving, and keep performing even in
the midst of pain, loneliness, and absurdity. Charlie Chaplin’s comical silhouette walking away has always broken my heart. Behind all the slapstick, the falling, and the exaggerated bodily gestures lies the full vulnerability and dignity of an ordinary man. He always carries the poetry of “failure,” moving forward with ridiculous little steps,
tenderly and awkwardly approaching an imperfect world. And Federico Fellini made me realize that reality is not necessarily more real than fantasy. His world feels like an endless carnival: desire, religion, flesh, memory, circus, seaside, music — everything dissolves into one another.
In the circus, everyone is performing.
Everyone is lonely.
Everyone longs to be seen.
When the lights come on, people laugh.
When the lights go out, only the empty tent remains, along with exhausted people and
animals.
The world is as absurd, cruel, and pitiful as that circus.
And yet, there is still love inside the circus.

Harriet Loffler: What conditions do you need in order to make work – do you play music? Or require silence. And can you describe your studio? What images keep you company there?

Shafei Xia: If, in that moment, my heart feels settled, then even if friends around me are chatting or playing mahjong, nothing can disturb my process of creation. Once I enter a state of flow, all the surrounding noise simply becomes part of the background.
Sometimes I play Bach on my record player; sometimes I listen to pop music on my computer. I also listen to audiobooks or podcasts. My studio is very much like my paintings. I never imagined beforehand what it would
eventually look like. I simply followed my intuition, slowly collecting objects that I loved, one by one.
There is a red vintage armchair bought from a secondhand furniture shop. On the opposite wall hang two ukiyo-e prints I purchased in Kyoto. Against the wall stands a red electric piano, and a red DVD shelf that I use to display small toys and ceramics. On the wall hangs a print of Edvard Munch, alongside two photographs of nude women. There is a coffee machine, a record player. My desk is vintage green, paired with a pink computer. Spread across the table are more than a dozen books: poetry by Charles Bukowski, writings by Hannah Arendt…
I will bring a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray with me, board a 7:30 Sunday morning flight to London, and come to meet all of you.