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Alice Xu is an emerging artist working in the drawing and painting medium. She often focuses on themes of life and figurative works. Xu likes to treat her paintings and drawings almost like a photo diary, keeping scenes of the everyday and documenting the mundane, instances of people captured like a moment in time and scenes she finds interesting. Alice hopes to bring attention to these simple, unfluctuating life moments through her artworks, with a big focus on the social life and the interaction where everyone is concentrated and immersed in their current affairs. 

 Alice’s works are split between her “Community Paintings” and “Entropic Landscapes”. Her figures are focused on ordinary street dwellers, and the contemporary ‘flaneurs’, or ‘heroes of modern life’ going about their daily business. The position of the individual in the community lies at the core of Alice’s practice. Her landscapes focus on the waste and decay of structures and inhabited spaces over time. The decision to paint these dilapidated and rundown areas is similar to the theorist Michael De Certeau’s original concept of the negative aesthetic; when we engage with and notice areas that require improvement, we are more likely to achieve it. When we pay attention to the messy areas in our house, we are more likely to clean it up. The anti aesthetic encounters play a role in striving for better aesthetics in our everyday surroundings and existence. Using various methods of collage and photomontage, Alice combines images and creates fictional yet believable worlds through digital photo manipulation or fusing straight onto the canvas. By compositing and arranging these unappealing scenes into something more whimsical and pleasant, her own experience of the world becomes more aesthetic.