Kexin Wei

Capstone Project: Already Written

Written is an artist book made from close-up photographs of the human body and the natural world — skin next to bark, veins next to flower veins, palm lines next to tree rings. Shot at extreme close range, the two start to look like the same thing. Between the pages, there is soil, bark, dried flowers — things collected from each shoot — so the book has smell and texture, not just images. Somewhere underneath all of this is 小六壬, a Chinese cosmological system that sees the body and nature as following the same logic, written by the same hand. That system doesn't show up directly in the work. It's just the reason I knew where to look.

What inspired your project?

I've been researching "Xiao Liu Ren", a form of Chinese divination, and became drawn to the worldview underneath it — the idea that the body and the natural world follow the same logic, shaped by the same forces. I've always believed in fate, and this system gave me a language for that belief. The joints of your fingers map onto the six palaces. The lines on your palm follow the same grammar as the rings inside a tree. The body has already been encoded by the universe. You are only learning to read it. Inspired by the work of Ana Mendieta and Kiki Smith, I wanted to make something that sits with that feeling — quietly, without over-explaining it.

Bio

Kexin Wei is a Performance Studies student at NYU Tisch, with a minor in Producing. She is drawn to the space where the human body and the natural world quietly overlap — the textures, the patterns, the systems that connect them without announcing themselves. Her work tends to be hands-on and material: installations, artist books, objects you can touch. She is also interested in interactive art and how physical making can carry ideas that words can't quite reach. Alongside her practice, she makes an attention to how a work exists in space, and how it meets the people who encounter it.