Q&A with Chunxiao Qu

Chunxiao Qu is a Chinese-born artist and writer based in Melbourne. Her writing and conceptual practice focus on language, power, and structural critique. She has exhibited widely across Australia and internationally, and been published in Un Magazine. She is the author of two poetry collections, and is currently working on Love Poem (a poetic trilogy) and The Mad God Trilogy, while building a long-term literary universe of 133 books.

‘I Am Not Lu Xun’s Descendant’ speaks to the resistance of identity-based narratives and inherited labels—dismantling cultural expectations and the violence of being forced to become a mouthpiece for culture. You write, ‘there is nothing universal about what I write’. Can you elaborate on the isolation that comes with shedding these expectations, and how your deconstruction of cultural assumptions impacted this piece?

When I write, I try to step outside the identities that are supposed to explain me. ‘There is nothing universal about what I write’ is not a rejection of culture, but a rejection of being drafted into cultural duty. Once you remove the expectation to ‘represent’, you notice a different kind of clarity—an isolation that is almost architectural.

I became interested in what remains after identity is stripped away: residue, distortion, mistranslation. These are far more revealing than inherited narratives. This piece grew from that space.

Letting go of cultural assumptions allowed the language to be sharper and less obedient. It let the work speak without needing to be emblematic of anything larger than itself. I am not escaping my background; I am simply refusing the idea that it should predetermine what my writing must mean.

I love how bold the title of the piece is. As a writer of a specific culture, it is so easy to feel as though you have been ‘assigned’ your identity, and I appreciate the way your piece explores the specific tension of expectation and autonomy. What does it look like to you to unassign that expectation, and what made you feel it was important to resist these identities?

Writers are often expected to confirm the stories their cultures want to tell. The title of this piece was my way of declining that assignment. To ‘unassign’ an identity is to reclaim the right not to translate yourself for others—not to flatten your complexities into something familiar or symbolic.

For me, resisting these identities is not an act of rebellion but of accuracy. The work becomes cleaner when it is no longer shaped by the need to be legible or representative. Autonomy begins when the sentence stops performing the role others have prescribed for it.

I don’t aim to deny lineage; I aim to stop being written by it.

I understand you explore these themes in an array of other art forms and mediums. How do you think these art forms inform each other’s outcomes? Do you find yourself exploring the same themes and ideas across sculpture, poetry, and painting?

I move between mediums because each one opens a different way of thinking about fracture—of material, of syntax, of meaning. Sculpture lets me work with physical resistance; poetry lets me work with linguistic tension; installation deals with space and the body’s movement through it.

The themes across these forms are not identical, but the method is. I’m always interested in how structures hold, collapse, or miscommunicate. A poem can behave like an installation—opaque, spatial, unwilling to resolve. A sculpture can function like a line of text—direct, interruptive, quietly argumentative.

Working across mediums helps me test how far language can stretch before it becomes something else entirely, and how art can speak without performing identity.

Grace Greedy