Xinyi Mei works across video, film, photography, performance, and installation to compose teasing situations for temporary dialogue. Her practice investigates the failures and restrictions of communication, affection, and belief within digital culture.

Her recent works interweave material metaphors and ritual gestures— hanging, folding, and reflecting—as ways to read urban infrastructure and emotional labor. Mei explores how objects suspend between gravity and narrative, and how care and control manifest through surfaces, joints, and adhesives. Her approach draws from feminist theory, media archaeology, and East Asian pop imaginaries to translate affect into spatial choreography.

In Berlin, she extends Hanging Study by transforming logistical materials into snowflake-like assemblages that act as both installation and instrument. These modular structures reflect on systems of support and the poetics of suspension, turning industrial circulation into a site of sensorial inquiry. In parallel, she develops a film-fiction project inspired by Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood, reimagining the city’s history through drifting recollection and fictional encounters.

Her project invites viewers to attune to the subtle tension between structure and collapse, faith and fatigue, and intimacy and distance—to how both cities and emotions settle, loosen, and reassemble through small, momentary negotiations.