Xin Zhang’s work explores sexuality, body consciousness, healing, and freedom, reworking the “gaze” through immersive performances that challenge the limits of the body. At JX Studio she runs a Shibari healing practice (JX Studio n.d.), and her artistic work joins a wider effort to enculturate new rituals within a subcultural community intent on redefining itself. This raises the question of whether art inspired by a form of sex-play is truly an expression of a different perspective, or whether it plays upon the voyeuristic tendencies of the public?
Consent, trust, and mutual participation sit at the centre of contemporary Shibari, a Japanese rope-binding form that draws on hojojutsu, the feudal martial art samurai once used to restrain captives (Tokyo Weekender 2024). Its history in the West runs the gamut from appropriation to appreciation, and artistic it has a cousin in Surrealism’s fascination with restraint, most pointedly in Hans Bellmer’s photographs of Unica Zürn bound tightly in rope, made across the late 1950s (The Brooklyn Rail 2012).
A more immediate lineage runs through contemporary Japanese practitioners. Hajime Kinoko, who has wrapped entire galleries in red rope, works to unsettle the trope of the restrained female body, treating rope as a bond of interconnection rather than a tool of dominance (Yokogao Magazine 2025). Zhang inherits this visual vocabulary but redirects it. Her works propose a different view of a practice the wider culture tends to file as private, recasting it as at once an identity and an account of the route towards authenticity. JX Studio’s own language frames the rope not as a tactile medium alone but as “a bridge to the subconscious,” a path to balance “between constraint and release” (JX Studio n.d.).
The strongest part of her work treats emerging, subcultural forms as aesthetic and self-contained bodies of knowledge that define a fresh socio-cosmological way of being in the world. And while a fuller, cross-cultural account of what this precept holds sits outside the scope of this article; one finds a profound variety in what defines a Shibari-based embodied culture. Indeed, Zhang’s interest lies in her refusal to present a dogmatically central set of beliefs. She demonstrates instead that an interpretive, personal experience becomes the core structural habitus, to borrow a term from Bourdieu (1977), who describes how structures, actions, behaviours, and preferences settle into strategic maps that guide how individuals think and act. The strictures of society give way, then, to the restraints of rope, which for Zhang, and presumably for other practitioners, supply a sense of immanent freedom, choice, and control.
Based across Beijing and London, Zhang (b. 2002) is a multidisciplinary artist, UAL graduate, and rope practitioner whose immersive installations, performances, and works take the body as their theme, tracing the interlocking shadows of intimacy and resistance that shape her practice. Drawing on Shibari-inspired rope work, wax, fabric, and found objects, pieces such as Cocooned 2 (2025) and The Bound Gaze (2025) challenge gendered aesthetics and normative perceptions of the body. Yet beyond diaristic report, what can these works tell a viewer unfamiliar with the culture Zhang inhabits? Does the distance prove too great for general appreciation? Are we outsiders looking in?
Red rope criss-crosses the naked figure in Cocooned 2 (2025), a portrait of the artist’s experience of Shibari, desire, and silence that holds exposure and concealment in tension. The rope pierces and binds both canvas and figure, tracing the boundary between control and longing and turning the active participant from watcher into watched, a shift the title already signals. Constraint here reads as a marker of the psychological change held within the unpolished body, a revelation reached through confession and desire.
Rope works harder in The Bound Gaze (2025), where it forms a lattice that draws the two halves of the painted surface together. That joining matters: it knots together cultural behaviour, personal desire, and the conceptual themes of gendered norms and subcultural recognition. Such recognition has carried the artist into numerous international art spaces and gender-focused exhibitions, and marked her out as a young artist bridging Eastern bodily aesthetics and contemporary experimental art.
Art often links new forms of thought to expressive means. Zhang draws on her personal experiences of a different cultural mode as the language for her art, working to bridge the “gaze” and the assumptions of participant and viewer implicit in the art world: ties that bind and, ideally, inform and liberate.
Bibliography
Bourdieu P 1977, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R Nice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
JX Studio n.d., JX Studio, viewed 5 June 2026, jxartstudio.com.
The Brooklyn Rail 2012, ‘Bound: Hans Bellmer and Unica Zürn’, The Brooklyn Rail, May, viewed 5 June 2026, brooklynrail.org/2012/05/artseen/bound-hans-bellmer-and-unica-zrn.
Tokyo Weekender 2024, ‘A history of Shibari: the evolution of Japanese rope bondage’, Tokyo Weekender, 27 November, viewed 5 June 2026, www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/history-of-shibari-the-evolution-of-japanese-rope-bondage.
Yokogao Magazine 2025, ‘Shibari’s stranglehold on the world’, Yokogao Magazine, 22 April, viewed 5 June 2026, www.yokogaomag.com/editorial/shibari-stranglehold-on-the-world.
Selected Exhibitions
2025
Beneath The Veil, curated by Amy Oliver, The House of Smalls Art Gallery, UK.
Everything Then Is Now, curated by Kaycee (SPIRA9 Gallery), Old Waiting Room, Peckham, London.
18th Community Art Exhibition, Circular ArtSpace, Bristol.
Windows Granted, curated by Zhiwu Zhu & Yurui Shi, The Handbag Factory, London.
2024
Tactile Threshold, performance art exhibition exploring intimacy and consent.
REVOLUTION, Degree Show, University of the Arts London.
Curatorial Projects & Interdisciplinary Collaborations
The Unknown Realm | Lead Curator & Performer | London, 2025. Co-organised London’s inaugural Asian rope culture pop-up. Programmed a series of Shibari performances and curated the artist line-up to bridge subculture and contemporary performance art.
ZHU Studio Series | Conceptual Lead | London, 2023–2024. Developed a sequence of interactive events (Rope & Wax, Flowers & Rope, Thousand Hands Bound) blending ritualistic improvisation with audience participation.
NEONEO x JX Studio | Commissioned Artist | 2024
Developed site-specific installations that reimagined domestic products as tactile, symbolic artworks through live performance.
Selected Press & Publications
Moody Magazine (UK), LGBTQ+ Intimacy Issue, 2024. Served as Visual Director for the editorial, integrating rope art into fashion styling to explore identity and queer intimacy.
Images courtesy of the artist © Xin Zhang. This article is part of a supported series by emerging artists including Xin Zhang. All unattributed photography by Xin Zhang.
Ex-London based reader of art and culture. LSE Masters Graduate. Arts and Culture writer since 1995 for Future Publishing, Conde Nast, Wig Magazine and Oyster. Specialist subjects include; media, philosophy, cultural aesthetics, contemporary art and French wine. When not searching for road-worn copies of eighteenth-century travelogues he can be found loitering in the inspirational uplands of art galleries throughout Europe.
