3 September 2026
Artist Highlight - Xiaoyan Chen
Interview and Review
Xiaoyan Chen is a UK-based artist working across jewellery and objects, creating small-scale,
installation-like works that invite interaction. She graduated from the Birmingham City University
School of Jewellery with a First Class Honours degree in Jewellery and Objects. Her work has been
recognised internationally, receiving the Showcase Award at the Slovenian Jewellery Week. She is
currently an Artist in Residence at Birmingham City University.
ARTIST INTERVIEW
1. Chastity uses jewellery to examine social rules that are often internalised and difficult to see. What drew you to jewellery as a medium for making these hidden pressures visible?
What interested me was that both jewellery and chastity operate quietly within everyday life. Jewellery is something people wear routinely, often without questioning it, while chastity values can also become so deeply embedded in social behaviour that they appear natural or invisible. Because jewellery exists within daily experience rather than outside it, it allowed me to explore how these ideas continue to shape contemporary life in subtle ways. I was interested in using a familiar and intimate object to draw attention to social pressures that are equally familiar, yet rarely examined.
2. The collection is structured through six interconnected sub-themes. How did you decide on this framework, and how do the pieces speak to one another as a whole?
The six themes were not planned from the outset. The project began with a broader investigation into chastity and whether it continues to influence women’s lives today. Through conversations and interviews with women, I repeatedly encountered experiences relating to violence, marriage, education, media representation, and social expectations. These recurring patterns gradually formed the framework of the collection. Although each piece addresses a different issue, they are connected by a common concern: the persistence of chastity-based values. Together, the works suggest that what often appears as separate social problems may in fact be linked by deeper cultural assumptions.
3. Several works in the collection use mechanisms such as locks, zippers, lenses, and cages. How do these interactive elements shape the viewer’s understanding of control and restriction?
I was interested in using mechanisms that are immediately recognisable. A lock, a cage, or a lens already carries strong associations that viewers can identify at first glance. However, I did not want the work to end there. Through touching, opening, rotating, or wearing the pieces, viewers gradually uncover additional layers of meaning. This process mirrors the way many social values operate: they may appear ordinary on the surface, yet reveal more complex systems of control when examined more closely. Interaction, therefore, becomes a way of moving beyond recognition towards reflection.
4. Within Chastity, the body is not only a site of adornment, but also a site of pressure, silence, and negotiation. What do you hope viewers reconsider about the relationship between jewellery and the body after encountering the work?
I hope viewers reconsider how social values become attached to the body. Many of the issues explored in Chastity are often discussed individually, as separate problems affecting women in different ways. What interested me was how these experiences may be connected by a shared system of beliefs that continues to shape behaviour, expectations, and opportunities. By placing these narratives onto the body, the work highlights how cultural values are not abstract ideas but forces that are lived, negotiated, and carried physically. I hope viewers leave questioning not only the individual issues presented, but also the assumptions that connect them.
RULES WORN CLOSE
Review by Sara Chyan, Curator
Xiaoyan Chen’s Chastity begins with ordinary actions: looking through something, opening a book, pulling a zip, putting on a ring. None of these gestures is unusual. Across the collection, Xiaoyan makes each one carry a restriction that is normally much harder to see.
The six parts of the project deal with media stereotypes, incomplete sexual education, sexual assault, domestic violence, restricted horizons and the value placed on women through marriage. Xiaoyan did not begin by deciding on these six categories. They developed through conversations with women, as the same kinds of experiences and expectations kept appearing.
That matters because the collection could otherwise become quite diagrammatic. Several of the symbols are deliberately easy to read. A lens controls the view. A zip sits across the mouth. A cage-like structure interrupts vision. The meaning often arrives before we have spent very long with the object.
At times, I think that directness works against the pieces. The zip at the mouth, for example, is almost too obvious as an image of enforced silence. It becomes more interesting once the mechanism is considered: the brooch refuses to close. The object does not simply represent silence; something in it fails to behave as expected.
The materials help as well. Much of the metal is worn, oxidised and rough rather than polished into conventional jewellery. The surfaces feel handled and slightly resistant. The ruby ring for Domestic Violence comes closest to familiar adornment, which makes its subject particularly uncomfortable. A form associated with love, commitment and marriage is being asked to carry something very different.
I am also cautious about placing all six subjects beneath one idea of chastity. Poor sexual education, media representation, assault and domestic violence are very different experiences. Connecting them can reveal a shared set of social assumptions, but it can also make those differences seem smaller than they are. The individual pieces are important because they give each condition its own action and physical consequence.
Xiaoyan’s work is most convincing once the objects leave the table and meet the body. Looking through a restricted frame or wearing something across the mouth changes the argument. The social rule is no longer only being explained. Someone has to physically deal with it.