Mirror Huang Jingxuan

Performance Artist working across live art, theatrical practice, and embodied research.

Mirror Huang Jingxuan is a multidisciplinary artist whose work intertwines the primal energy of the body with the labyrinth of the subconscious. Working through live performance, spatial situations, moving image, and poetic language, she materialises the non-real through action, disrupting habitual perception and linear logic, implicating audiences within the work itself.

Mirror’s work is grounded in long-term physical training and an ongoing exploration of presence and awareness, shaped by practices of sustained attention and embodied discipline. She holds an MA in Contemporary Performance Practice (Royal Holloway, University of London), alongside additional training in hypnotherapy undertaken in the UK. These experiences inform her sensitivity to how awareness operates within artistic contexts. Her work also draws from theatre-based approaches, shaped by her experience as a performer and theatre director, allowing dramaturgical intelligence, timing, and responsiveness to operate within action-based practice.

Mirror creates liminal spaces where strength meets softness, absurdity collides with poetry, and material reality is reconfigured through bodily action. She weaponizes vulnerability, treating fragility as a precise instrument for examining structures of relation and control, as well as perceptual norms. Through these encounters, inherited frameworks are stripped back, opening space for audiences to reconnect with the raw beauty pulsating beneath life’s surface.

In her Dream Sequence series (2024), performed from the public squares of Belfast to the galleries of London and Dublin, she dissolves the boundaries between waking life and dream logic, inviting audiences to witness the alchemy of this deliberate exposure. Here, as in all her works, she demands: Can we surrender control to intuition? Can destruction be an act of rebirth?

Her ongoing practice-as-research framework explores how shifts in attention and embodied states shape perception, agency, and performative action. Here, the body becomes a site where perception and memory are reorganised through action—where agency emerges as something enacted rather than assumed.

Alongside her artistic practice, she works across film and theatre. Approaching both screen and stage as extensions of her embodied practice, she treats acting as a mode of heightened presence, responsiveness, and decision-making under observation. Her screen work has been presented at major international film festivals, including Cannes, and recognised with a nomination for Best Lead Actress at the 2020 Madrid International Film Festival.

Performance Works

• <A Taoist-style self-destruction —— Crying 60>

  2026 10th Burning Snow International Performance Art Forum and Live Art, Performance location: Hohot Inner Mongolia, China, Length: 60 min

• <Dream Sequence 8 - Mapping the body>

  2025 Performance venue: Kulangsu Centre for Contemporary Art (KCCA), Kulangyu Island, Xiamen, China, Length: 45 min

   

• <Dream Sequence 7 - Eat, Bunny>

  2025 The 8th Cement Park Live Art Festival, Performance venue: Tai Art Museum, Shanghai, China,  Length: 59 min

    

• <Dream Sequence 6> - Walk with the Fire

  2025 The 5th Gravitational Body Performance & Live Art Festival, Performance venue: Juyuanli, Fuzhou city, China, Length:30 min

• <Trash Immortal: On ‘Silly Bastard’ Mountain >

  2025 Nomadic Art Project Guizhou Caohao ”Colletion” Art Residency Program, Performance location: Guizhou Weining Yi-Hui-Miao Autonomous County, China, Length: 20 min

    

• <Sustaining the Sunset>

  2025 Performance location: The desert in Dunhuang City, Jiuquan City, Gansu Province, Length 46 min

• <Dream Sequence 5>

  2024 Performance venue: Open Art Space, Xiayu village, Quzhou city, China  Length:15 min

   

• <Dream Sequence 4 - Art is not a mirror it’s a fucking hammer>

  2024 Cement Park Live Art Festival, Performance venue: Yell Art Space, Shanghai, China  Length: 30min

   

• <Dream Sequence 3>

  2024 Performance venue: Hundred Years Gallery, London, UK Length 20 min

   

• <Dream Sequence 2 - Live Upon Death>

  2024  Dublin Coddle performance & sound, Performance venue: Kirkos Art Space, Unite 44, Dublin, Ireland  Length 20min

• <Dream Sequence 1 - Snails’ Transporter>

  2024  Common Groundwork performance art exchange, Performance space: Writer’s Square, Belfast,  UK  Length: 50 min

• <Breathe and Hear>

  2024  Common Groundwork performance art exchange, Performance venue: Redeemer Central, Belfast, UK  Length: 20 min

• <Giving up Free Will is another Kind of Free Will>

  2023 Long Duration Performance, Length: 12 hours

• <Lean>               

  2023 Performance venue: A4 Art Museum, Chengdu, China  Length: 20 min

   

• <142857/Public Intimacy>             

  2023, Trigger Group Exhibition, Performance venue: A4 Art Museum, Chengdu China,  Length: 15 min

• <Murder That Tomato>  

  2023, Performance venue: FeiChuan Art Space, Wuhan, China  Length:15 min

Experimental Theatre Works

• <If I Were Yours>      

   2020, Performance venue: Tianmuli Square Fountain, Hangzhou, China  Length:30 min

• <Artificial Loneliness>  

  2019, Performance venue:Macao Bok Festival Commission Work then tour in theatre festivals,  Length: 60 min

• <Breathe to the Silence>

   2016-Till Now, Performance venues: Debut in London then tour in theatre festivals,  Length: 30 min

Directing Works

• <Underground>

  2024, Co-director, Experimental Theatre, Huichang Theatre Town

• <Why Do You Beat Him UP?>    

  2022, Director, STA New Experimental Space, YouGe Theater Group 

• <Sound Of The Silk Road> (Musical)

  2022, Assistant Director, ShaanXi Grand Theather,  Nederlander Worldwide Co.(Broadway)

• <Bra>

  2019, Director, Festival Tour, YouGe Theater Group

• <Gold Fish>                   

  2017, Director,  PengHao Theater, Penghao Prod

Acting Works

Theatre

• <Hamlet>

  2024, Role: The Queen Gertrude, Dir: Gocha Kapanadze, Shanghai Grand Theatre

   

• <Gianni Schicchi> (Immersive Theatre)

  2022, Role: Zita, Dir:Sun Chenxing, Asia Mansion Theater,YHH Theatre Prod  

• <LIES> (Interactive Theatre)          

  2019-2023, Role: Croupier, Dir:Alexander Devriendt, BoHua Square, CDE Live&OG Group(Belgium)

• <I Disappear>             

  2018, Role: My Friend’s Daughter Dir:Victoria Merrick, PengHao Theater

   

• <Doubt>                    

  2017, Role:Sister James, Dir:Chen Jie, DongGong Theater

Film

• <Woman by the sea>

  Role: Mother(Lead Role), Dir: Mengyuan Li

• <Intimacy> 

  Role:Qin (Lead Role), Dir:Jiang Yi Chun 

  2020 Madrid International Film Festival Best Actress Award Nomination

  2021 Asian Film Festival (Rome)

• <Asian Brass>

  Role: Li Ping (Lead Role), Dir:Ma Gu Yuan 

  2021 Cannes Court Metrage Selection

  2022 BISFF Selection

• <The Bright Fire>  

  Role: Mom (Supporting Role), Dir:Zoe Zou 

  2021 Cannes Court Metrage Selection

  2021San Jose International Short Film Festival

  2021 LA Femme International

• <Aboveboard Peepers>

  Role: Aline (Lead Role), Dir:Jiang Yi Chun 

Participatory Practice (since 2017)
Since 2017, Mirror has facilitated hypnosis-informed workshops that combine attention-based practice with artistic methods, exploring embodied states, perception, and action through guided exercises and collective protocols. Selected collaborations include:

• Kulangsu Centre for Contemporary Art (KCCA) - Mapping the Body unfolds as a workshop-to-performance practice in which the body maps sensation, memory, and place through movement and material traces.

• Shanghai Drama Arts Center — Meet Me in the Theater workshop series on self-inquiry through embodied performance practice.

• Inner Mongolia University of Technology — workshop programme leading to a devised performance project, The Opposite of Loneliness.

• The Good Work Festival — Public Rituals, a live collective hypnosis-informed action that temporarily reconfigured civic space through shared attention and presence.

Recognition

Grants & Art exchange

2024 “Common Groundwork” British Council Funded Artist Exchange with Bbeyond (Belfast)

2023 KERING Women in Motion Selected Female Artists

2022 & 2019: Shanghai Cultural Development Fund-supported directing projects

2019 Macao Bok Festival Commissioned Artist

Film

2020 Madrid International Film Festival Best Actress Nominee - Intimacy | Lead Role: Qin 

Publication

Co-authored novel Mirror in A Mirror (2024), a surreal narrative blending personal dreams and autobiography, published in the book <城市絮语>