'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
'Surging through exits when the bell goes' is a design-led research project that examines how the aesthetics of high school environments and digital platforms shape the hidden curriculum of contemporary education. It traces how physical architectures of control have evolved into the visual and behavioural architectures of digital systems, focusing on behaviour monitoring systems.
'Inheritance' is an immersive installation that transforms everyday materials into vessels of memory, care and connection. Through fragile yet grounded forms made from broken gum tree branches, turmeric and handwoven Bangladeshi Khadi, the work explores how making can hold and pass on inherited stories across generations and geographies.
'Steel Karkade' showcases the multifaceted experiences of Black women in the diaspora, as well as the artist’s South Sudanese heritage. For her, the livelihoods and narratives of her ancestors and the Black women who came before her are significantly underrepresented and unwritten; her practice endeavours to bring light and permanence to their stories and cultural history.
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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