Xiao Ke × Zi Han

Xiao Ke × Zi Han are a Chinese contemporary theatre artist duo whose distinctive practice has received wide recognition in the international arts field. Their works have travelled to more than twenty countries and have been presented at numerous internationally recognised theatres and arts festivals. In 2018, they founded iPANDA, a platform intended to foster exchange and resource integration in the field of Chinese contemporary theatre.

Xiao Ke × Zi Han have worked together in theatre and performance over the long term, taking the body as both method and point of departure. Their collaboration is not a fixed division of labour between dancer/choreographer and visual/sound artist. Instead, it brings two different forms of bodily knowledge and two approaches into a shared creative process: Xiao Ke begins from the body from within—through dance training, performance, and creation—while Zi Han uses sound, image, documentation, and structure to observe how bodies are organised, viewed, and translated. For them, this difference is itself a working method.

Their collaboration also extends from theatre into photography, video, performance art, and installation. Focusing on individual bodies, they explore the boundaries of expression within China’s public context. Rooting artistic ideas in everyday life, they practise the life cycle inherent in the proposition: “from life, vanishing into life.”

They attend to the finer details of contemporary society. In recent years, their works have increasingly reflected questions raised by China’s rapid social transformation. Deeply rooted in Chinese philosophy and culture while drawing from a rich range of international perspectives and knowledge frameworks, they create contemporary theatre experiences with social resonance—inviting deeper discussion and participation.