Shen Xin: Highland Embassy
Highland Embassy brings together three projects by artist and filmmaker Shen Xin and is showing at Collective Edinburgh from October to December 2025.
About Shen Xin: Highland Embassy
A solo exhibition by artist and filmmaker Shen Xin, part of We Contain Multitudes – a collaborative project in partnership with Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) and LUX Scotland, funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
Highland Embassy brings together three projects by artist and filmmaker Shen Xin which are all rooted in place and use storytelling to explore themes of migration, belonging, indigenous frameworks for languages and communities.
Bearing fruit of fondness (2025), is a film set on the Isle of Skye where Shen Xin lives and uses the leaves of a type of cotoneaster plant, which is an invasive species impacting local habitats, as a device to ground the films narrative and themes.
The second film, Solar Wheels (2024), draws on the Uyghur variation of the Wooden Horse story, using this narrative as a shared place to engage in relationship building with kindred communities.
Completing the exhibition is a new series of paintings used to illustrate a short children's story, The child of the mountain (“རིའི་བུ་མོ” in Tibetan), written by Shen Xin. The story reflects on the overharvesting of caterpillar fungus in Tibet as a tale of caution and as a contemporary myth.
Working across moving image, installation, performance, sound and text, Shen Xin creates immersive environments that challenge dominant narratives and propose alternative modes of understanding, rooted in relation, place and political agency.
About We Contain Multitudes
The commission marks a significant moment in We Contain Multitudes – a collaborative project that seeks to create systemic change in the Scottish visual arts sector for disabled artists, arts professionals and audiences.
We Contain Multitudes is dedicated to helping arts organisations embed anti-ableist practices and build programmes that more accurately reflect the diversity of the Scottish population. It is a process of learning – one that acknowledges the ongoing challenges and recognises that access measures alone are not enough to dismantle ableism.
Running until February 2026, each partner will generate a new commission, alongside published research to support long-term change in the sector. DCA will present a group exhibition featuring new and existing works by Andrew Gannon, Daisy Lafarge, Jo Longhurst and Nnena Kalu, while LUX Scotland will support a new commission to be presented online. The first of these commissions launches with Shen Xin’s exhibition at Collective.
This exhibition is commissioned by Collective as part of We Contain Multitudes, supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
Image: Solar Wheels, Shen Xin, 2024
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