Ang Xia Yi (b. 1996, Kuala Lumpur) is a Malaysian artist whose practice is concerned with themes surrounding ancestral history, memory, knowledge systems and broader contemporary crises concerning Southeast Asia. She uses archives to reconstruct new narratives of time and place, initiate dialogues and explore shifting notions of the self and our geo-bodies. She works across installation, drawing, photography and archival intervention using domestic textiles. She previously studied at Central Saint Martins, London in 2017 and has participated in a residency programme by Open Books International (Wales) with The Godown Arts Centre (Kuala Lumpur) and China Academy of Art (Hangzhou) in 2021. Brownprint series is drawn from the idea of a decaying, fallen ancestral tree that has once lived for millennia witnessing massive ecological and psychological shifts within humanity. The artist is interested to explore the formation of collective memories on ancestral land through grief, loss and regeneration. The death of an ancestral tree becomes a metaphor for the slow deterioration of an abandoned family home and was once a living archive. The decaying of the tree causes leaves to gradually shed and accumulate as scattered piles on the ground. ‘it has been twelve years since you left’ was first presented as an installation earlier this year in Yogyakarta, Indonesia to depict the aftermath of the occurrence and has since expanded through new forms of work. This series of paintings are made based on the act of surrendering, by allowing the lines of mother nature to guide the artist throughout her process. The artist begins by collecting a weekly batch of fallen, dried leaves from a large tree and uses them as a stencil to draw these meandering lines. These lines connects to form a familiar imagery from a far, which commonly occurs when one is walking in the middle of a rainforest or during stargazing at night. Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon where we see recognisable shapes, animals or faces in clouds, rock formations or in unrelated objects around us. This tendency is often interpreted as a bridge between the physical and our unseen worlds, symbolizing divine communication of heightened intuition.