Allan Weilun Xiao
See it On Campus: Level 2
Renée Van Halm + Pietro Widmer Graduation Award for Visual Arts — Winner
Artist’s Statement
My work revolves around clay, but it is really about people—how we carry histories, how systems shape us, and how we quietly push back against said systems. I’m drawn to forms that display authority: uniforms, monuments, ceremonial objects. I intend not to replicate their power but to bring attention to the silence occurring beneath them.
Clay, in its mutability, becomes a vehicle for this attentiveness, as it remembers every touch yet resists perfection. In working with it, I’ve come to understand fragility not as a weakness, but as something deeply human, bringing forth evidence of tension, effort, and care. Clay allows me to speak in a language that is both ancient and present, fragile yet grounded.
Much of my work orbits around questions of identity and beliefs, what we inherit through culture and history, how we perform within an established system of power, and what we choose to reshape going forward as individuals and a community. I’m especially interested in the quiet moments when social systems falter: when external appearances falter, a surface may crack as clay might during the process of creation. In these moments, something honest emerges. In a world that demands certainty, my sculptures brings forth ambiguity, in what they might reveal, what they hold, and how they might connect us.
Monument to Uncertainty
Recycled clay fired to cone 6, Glaze, Oxide Wash, Firebricks, Gold Luster
74″ x 19″ x 19″ (Left), 57″ x 17″ x 20″ (Right)
2025
Monument to Uncertainty operates as a sculptural dialogue: one part bureaucratic absurdity, one part spiritual dissonance. Through form exaggeration and symbolic inversion, the installation reveals the costumes of authority as both performative and precarious. It is a shrine to contradictions: a businessman on a brittle plinth facing a Buddha in military garb, caught in a silent exchange across a void charged with doubt, ritual, and control, inviting viewers to navigate the uneasy space between reverence and irony, tradition and critique.
Selected Works
Seeing is Believing
Ceramics, Glaze
21” x 9” x 6.5”
2023
This work explores how systems of belief are constructed through repetition, performance, and the illusion of certainty. Seeing is Believing questions the relationship between authority and perception, how power often depends less on what is true and more on what appears to be true. The figure becomes a vessel for this idea, not as a character, but a stand-in for roles we occupy, imitate, and inherit.
By stripping away individual identity, the sculpture draws attention to how authority is shaped through cultural scripts—gestures, uniforms, and behaviours that signal control while masking vulnerability or blindness. The gesture resists narrative closure, instead offering a meditation on the tension between visibility and complicity, between knowing and not wanting to know. In this way, it invites viewers to reflect not only on what they see, but on what they’ve been taught to trust.
Vessel of Good Intentions
Recycled clay, Glaze, Oxide Wash
10”x 10.5”
January 2025
Vessel of Good Intentions reflects on how ideals and promises are carried within cultural forms, even as their meanings shift. Built from the familiar shape of a vase, the work questions what it means to preserve not only goods but also unseen systems of belief. It suggests that good intentions, while sincere, are often entangled with forms of blindness, like acts performed without a full understanding of their consequences. Rather than offering resolutions, the vessel holds space for the tension between trust and complicity.
The Structure Beneath
Recycled Clay, Glaze, Underglaze
11” x 14”
2025
The Structure Beneath reflects on how social, cultural, or psychological patterns offer the comfort of order, even as their cracks quietly multiply beneath the surface.
Certainty is never neutral. Grids, rules, and categories can stabilize, but they can also confine, distort, or erase. Beneath every structure lies a shifting, unfinished terrain. By emphasizing slippage rather than perfection, The Structure Beneath invites viewers to sit with the fragility that often hides behind appearances of clarity, and to consider what remains when the frameworks we trust begin to dissolve.
Save On Foods
Raw recycled clay, various plant seeds, metal rack, wood shelf, plastic sheeting, humidifier, extension cord
78”x 35”x 19”
2024
Save On Foods questions the uneasy balance between industrial preservation and organic growth. By embedding seeds into raw clay shaped like a grocery basket and nurturing them within a controlled, artificial environment, the work points to the contradictions of modern food systems: where abundance is manufactured, and life is managed as inventory.
The irony of the title, borrowed from a well-known grocery chain, invites viewers to reconsider what it means to “save” in a world where convenient consumerism often lacks care. Rather than freezing time or extending shelf life, the work leans into temporality and vulnerability. The sprouting seeds push back against the rigid forms that hold them, offering a quiet resistance to the logic of mass production. In doing so, Save On Foods becomes a meditation on sustainability, labour, and the human desire to both protect and exploit life-giving systems.
