By adopting an omnipresent perspective and a highly mediated palette, she heightens the monumentality of historical museums that call forth the atmosphere of cathedrals.

However, behind the devotional process of replicating their structures, she also experiences a desire for alterations and derangement. Such spaces inspire reverie as well as a sense of domination and surveillance. She responds to this state of tension by removing and repurposing the original artworks that inhabit the spaces, introducing counterfactual narratives and contemporary adaptions of historical traditions.

Using painting as a way of embodied thinking, Xu bears witness to the sovereignty of institutional spaces and their role in our culture—how they function as a site of indoctrination to the public, through the supremacy of idealized space.