Pang Alina (Xiai)
ART WORKS
Within the Structure
Medium: Steel Tubes, Aluminum Sheets
Dimensions: 31.5 in x 13.4 in x 8.3 in
Steel tubes form a rigid framework symbolizing social regulations and expectations, stable yet stifling.
Within, abstract forms spiral freely, resisting conventions while being shaped by the system. The work critiques the tension between collective order and individual diversity.
Year: 2024
Urban Palimpsest
Medium: Wooden Sticks, Acrylic Sheets, Paper, Iron Wire
Dimensions: 8.7 in x 8.5 in x 8.5 in
A triangular prism installation projects one poetic line in four ancient Chinese scripts onto urban architecture, bridging the evolution of language with modern public space.
This work reactivates historical writing through light, inviting reflection on time, culture, and collective memory.
Year: 2024
Unnamed Subway
Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Dimensions: 23.6 in x 31.5 in
Unnamed Subway depicts a crowded subway with open doors and hazy light, seen from outside like a quiet observer.
Blurred or painted-over faces symbolize lost identity and social ignorance, embodying urban anonymity. A slumping figure breaks the scene's order, inviting peering curiosity and revealing tensions of detachment and suppressed desire.
Muted urban tones create a cinematic, uneasy atmosphere. This work serve as a mirror to urban life, showing how we're structured, watched, and quietly erased.
Year: 2025
Guests in the Scene
Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Dimensions: 23.6 in x 31.5 in
This painting stages a quiet but unsettling contrast: modernist Western architecture paired with traditional Chinese couplets and figures dressed in Song dynasty clothing.
These symbols evoke ritual, memory, and displacement, exploring belonging and cultural identity in migration. Those contrast figures create the uncanny effect, questioning how traditional reconfigures in new contexts. This work is a reflect on cultural reclaiming, cross-cultural dialogue, and cultural appropriation
Year: 2025
Pigment Evolution
Medium: Electrical Wire, Seashells, Gold Leaf, Wire Mesh, Acrylic, Quartz Sand
Dimensions: 17.7 in x 19.5 in x 1.6 in
This work examines pigment's cultural evolution.
The inner lapis-colored layer with seashell fragments evokes its sacred, natural origins, like lapis lazuli used for the Virgin Mary's robes. Coiled wire symbolizes industrial-era synthetic production. Electrical wires point to the digital age, where color exists as encoded data.
A material and conceptual exploration of color's transformation.
Year: 2024
Empty Plaza
Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Dimensions: 19.7 in x 27.6 in
A utopian urban scene unfolds in rigid geometry and vivid color, but the central plaza is hauntingly empty.
This imagined city, striped of human presence, reflects a reality overdesigned and emotionally void. The rational order hint not at stability, but at a fragile, surreal dream on the verge of collapse.
Year: 2024
Take a Step Back
Medium: Watercolor on Paper
Dimensions: 15.8 in x 15.8 in
This painting questions social norms around identity and beauty, and offers an inclusive vision of humanity: complex, multifaceted, and diverse.
It depicts a face assembled from fragments representing different races, genders, and ages. Each section reveals the differences rather than hiding them. The piece suggests that true wholeness comes from acknowledging and valuing diversity. By highlighting the visible distinctions, it refuses simplistic unity and embraces the tension of coexistence. It invites viewers to reflect on the ways society defines belonging and challenges them to see connection through differences. It celebrates the idea that our shared humanity is strengthened by its rich variety.
Year: 2023
Insensible Insider
Medium: Watercolor on Paper
Dimensions: 18.9 in x 27.6 in
This painting explores the idea of the bystander effect and critiques our ignorance. The main figure, the Buddha, presents an overt position and sets up the role of a tranquil observer on the internal destruction of human civilization. However, the flame pattern reflected on the Buddha’s face breaks the Buddha's bystander role and implies the truth of the Buddha’s involvement before becoming aware.
With the constant flow of information in today’s world, it often projects a bystander role for us, and gives us the feeling that we are not involved in this information. However, much of the time, just like the Buddha, we are unaware insiders.
Year: 2024
Human Shape Blind Spot
Medium: Wood, Pastel, Acrylic Paint, Strings
Dimensions: 20 in x 20 in x 20 in
This installation explores the idea that everyone has a blind spot shaped exactly like themselves. The child's action of covering their eyes with their hands symbolizes a willful avoidance of reality. The background features a ruined cityscape presented in an abstract utopia color scheme, contrasting with the realistic drawing of the architecture.
With the change of the viewing position, the strings form different combinations, which represent the change of perspective. The light connects the separated parts of the installation together, the shadow takes exactly the shape of the child, which further enhances the idea of blind spot.
Year: 2024
Multi-me
Medium: Rubik’s Cube, Acrylic Sheets, Kraft Paper, PVC Foam Board, Charcoal, Acrylic Paint
Dimensions: 23.2 in x 16.3 in x 12.2 in
I fragmented myself into "faces" linked to Realism, Pop Art, Dadaism, Surrealism, Cubism, and De Stijl, each reflecting different ways I see emotion, self, and culture. Built as a complex abstract combination of Rubik's Cube and geometrical forms, it creates the possibility of rearrange and discover new combinations of "me".
Year: 2024
