Artist and Architect & Founder, XYTOPIA
Xinyi Wang is a Beijing-born, Sydney-based artist and architect. He founded XYTopia, his brainchild practice, to work from two simple anchors: X for the unknown, and Y for the questions.
Beginning without preconceptions, he listens to people and places, following small clues, stories and memories, and externalizes an embodied understanding from the emotion inside, turning inner sense into spatial experiences that can be shared.
His work focuses not on medium but meaning. Each piece asks what a site wants to say and how an audience might read, dwell, and respond. Research, poetry and craft guide the process; form arrives slowly, through care and collaboration, until it feels honest and alive.
Trained at the University of Western Australia, he works internationally across scales, yet holds to a quiet principle: everything is designed. He invites co-creation with clients, organizations, communities, consultants and fabricators so that ideas remain porous, evolving and open.
Recent recognition includes award-winning work at Viseu, Portugal; the much-celebrated public light installation, “Whale Fall,” at the Amsterdam Light Festival 2025 in collaboration with Greenpeace Netherlands; and the “Dune Dusk Dawn Lamp,” which premiered at Alcova during Milan Design Week 2026 and is being exhibited as part of the FROMM “INTERLACED Dialogues in Design” exhibition at the Design Doha Biennial 2026.
For Xinyi, practice is a conversation: between question and consequence, memory and imagination. From X to Y, the work moves from inquiry to expression, from the intangible to the felt, leaving space for wonder and for the world to answer back.
