Xinyu Huang

Combining theoretical study and creative practice, Xinyu Huang’s research explores how the fragmented, atomized condition of contemporary individuals might be alleviated through an existential and perceptual engagement with what she calls the “private wilderness”.

Rather than a claim of possession—not “the wilderness that belongs to me”—the “private wilderness” emerges as an ontological assertion shaped by primal experience: I am wilderness. It offers a poetic response to the dilemma of social atomization, seeking not to escape fragmentation, but to dwell within it differently.

Beginning with the individual as an “atom”, the research traces how a stable core of life might be gradually recovered through a fundamental symbiosis with wilderness—not as external landscape, but as an inner, durational field of being: fluid, affective, and continuously unfolding.

In this way, the “private wilderness” resists codification and symbolic fixation, proposing a quiet yet radical gesture—to transform isolation into a shared, unspoken field of presence.

Names of Supervisors:

• Philip Braham
• Sandra Plummer