Huilan Xu is a senior student major in Film, Photography, and Visual Art at Ithaca College. She is from Southern China, a warm tropical area where rain and heat are the prominent parts of her life. School, factory, village, city, and home are five major institutions that shape her and her understanding of the world. They are also the key sources of creation and inspiration for her, which are expressed through various mediums, including photography, film, writing, painting, and installation. With photography, she is specifically keen on sequencing, abstraction, structure, and landscape. She likes to explore grouping or arranging images in ways that give rise to collision and complicated experience with the images. Her works are usually enigmatic, like puzzles, through which she desires to not only depict the ineffable through the ambiguity of images but also invite and engage her viewers into the process of interpreting and solving the work in the way they wish.