The Northern Filter

The Northern Filter, a new exhibition by Wendi Xie, looks at the romanticised idea of the Nordic sublime and how it is shaped through personal and cultural lenses. Working across glassblowing, printmaking, and kiln-forming, Xie gathers visual fragments collected during her time in Norway: airport corridors, car windows, shifting weather, everyday encounters and fleeting glimpses of landscape. These impressions are layered, fused, and suspended within glass, turning the material itself into a kind of filter.
Rather than functioning as records of a place, the images become constructions — shaped by distance, memory and expectation. The exhibition asks a simple but resonant question: when we arrive somewhere new, do we truly see it, or do we use the landscape as a vessel for our own longings?
Xie (b. 1989), based between Shenzhen and Dongguan, works with sculpture, imagery and site-specific installation, with glass at the core of her practice. Her work draws on both craft and the transformation of industrial readymades, resulting in forms that are structurally exact yet quietly emotional. Her pieces are held in public collections including the Shanghai Museum of Glass, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Suqian Museum of Glass.
She has been artist-in-residence at S12 Galleri og Verksted through January and February, developing The Northern Filter on site.