/ 2022 / /

• Prize
  Curator Selection
• Photographer
  Xinya Xu, China
• Date of Photograph
  2020.03 - 2022.05
• Category
  Asia
• Website
  https://oliviaxu.myportfolio.com/work

Due to China's Zero-COVID policy, Shanghai citizens have been under extremely strict lockdown since March. More than 30 million residents have been forced-quarantined for more than 60 days, which includes my family. Government called life in different stages of Covid prevention policy as 防疫日常 and 隔離日常. It seems that as long as using the word “日常”(normal life) to decorate propaganda, the government is able to glamorize everyday life that residents try their best to achieve in the time of turmoil. Thinking back to the past months, the "normal" life was not ordinary at all.

Xinya Xu is a visual artist who treats the everyday photograph as something that quietly holds the social and cultural texture of its moment. Working between the mundane and the unrepeatable, she photographs common life less as a record of one era than as a way to reach the feelings people share across language, culture, and history. Her work has been recognized by the Prix de la Photographie Paris, Fine Art Photography Awards and Tokyo International Foto Awards, and exhibited in Tokyo and Paris.