'Oil & Fire' brings together two works that address the migrant experience of “down-skilling”—the systemic devaluation of an individual’s skills, experience and labour through emigration. Set within the contained space of the studio, Down to Oil is composed of a series of performative gestures accumulating in intense affective forces, exposing the psychological toll of constraint and devaluation.
Please join us to celebrate the opening of this exhibition at First Site Gallery, 5– 7pm, Wednesday 8 April.
Huiyi Xiao is a Chinese-Australian artist whose practice spans performance-based video, installation and photography to conduct a somatic inquiry into the diasporic condition. As a first-generation migrant, she investigates how cultural and political forces are internalised, resisted and rewritten within the body. Employing an auto-ethnographic methodology, she transforms lived experience into constellations of metaphorical body-installations and performances. The artist positions her own body as a living archive, extending its narratives through the use of found objects and resonant sites that signify external social realities.
Xiao holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from RMIT University in 2025 and was the recipient of the Dean's Award for Academic Excellence, the Associate Dean Award for Photo Innovation, the Travel Scholarship, and the Art for Social Change Award. She was also a finalist in the Castlemaine Art Museum Experimental Print Prize in 2025.
Image: Huiyi Xiao, 'The Fire that Wouldn't Call Itself Ash' (video still), 2025. Image courtesy of the artist.
11am - 5pm Tuesday to Friday
Closed on public holidays
'Portable Stillness' (2025), is an ongoing spatial installation that explores how the making of miniature objects and floating altar-like displays can express memory, collection, and the domestic in transition. Motivated by the instability of diasporic living and continual relocation, Ko Jou Chen constructs handmade structures that carry memory and presence across her shifting environments.
'Slip' is a practice-led research project that explores the poetic qualities of the bluestones that have been discarded in recent construction works around RMIT University. Through the process of moulding and casting these stones into beeswax, Noah Bridger hopes to reimagine Melbourne’s urban landscape.
Chloe Rose Thomas’ exhibition, 'Can I Hold You?' centres on queer community and embodied practices of care, exploring what it means to take traditional photographic portraits of non-normative bodies and the histories they represent.
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.
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