Having grown up in China during a period of rapid urbanization and social change, He Xiangyu is especially attentive to the mutability of things and environments. His art practice could be seen as a proving ground or a laboratory of materials and concepts, in which he investigates and engages with a variety of personal, social, and political subjects. While his earlier projects often framed the material changes of objects as analogies for social phenomena, his recent work takes a more documentary and sometimes biographical approach to focus on marginalized communities and histories in the process of his home country’s grand march forward. His films and video installations have featured stories from North Korean defectors who live in hiding along the Chinese border, to students who came from African countries to study acrobatics in Hebei Province.