QiGong with Artist Tianhao Xu at Maslows
In a world where attention is currency and speed is the dominant metric, artist Tianhao Xu moves differently. His practice isn’t a race but a ritual; And his art – like his body – is a vessel for stillness, inquiry, and inherited rhythm. But this is no ordinary calm. Tianhao is the son of Shifu Shi Yanzi, a 34th-generation Shaolin warrior monk and one of the most well-known living emissaries of traditional Shaolin culture. Having served as Abbott of the Shaolin Temple UK, Shi Yanzi is famed not only for his martial skill but for his philosophical depth: shifting between silence and strike with equal intention.
Embodied Art And Energetic Code
Raised under his father’s discipline, Tianhao was immersed in Chan Buddhism, martial arts, and Qi Gong from an early age – not as performance, but as way-of-life. “From my father, I learned that a punch is not just a punch,” Tianhao says. “It’s a question you ask with your body, and sometimes the answer is silence.” Unlike many second-generation martial artists who walk away from tradition, Xu’s practice doesn’t reject his Shaolin roots, but alchemises them. His performances and visual works transform Qi Gong into a visual and somatic language that speaks in spirals.
In Tensile Equilibrium, he stood barefoot on a rooftop at dawn, repeating the same Qi Gong form for six hours while ink dripped slowly from his hands onto rice paper. This visually blurred the lines between discipline, devotion, and decay – a medication through meditation, focusing on inheritance, repetition, and what it means to choose one’s lineage rather than be bound by it.
Where Shi Yanzi embodies the Shaolin ethos – formidable, focused, unflinching – Tianhao channels its aesthetic and philosophical residues into new containers. His work is often described as “post-martial,” considered yet confrontational. In one installation, Monk’s Trace, Xu paints with the soles of his feet after Qi Gong practice, revealing a choreography of pressure and weight that reads like both a dance and a map. At the core of both father and son’s practice lies the same principle: cultivating internal energy (Qi) to harmonise with the world around you. But while Shifu Yanzi taught in temples and dojos, Tianhao expresses through pigments and pauses.
“The body remembers. The blood remembers. But inheritance isn’t static, it’s a movement. I’m not breaking with tradition, I’m breathing with it.” Like his father, Tianhao Xu sees Qi Gong as more than health or martial practice: it’s a spiritual technology, a feedback loop between mind, body, and cosmos. His art is an extension of this loop. Instead of asking what it means, Xu’s practice asks how it feels, and how it flows.
“Although I was often expected to follow in my father’s footsteps, I never really liked martial arts as a child. When I moved to London aged 9, I did a class at the Shaolin Temple UK. I was one of the noisiest and most mischievous children, and I only liked the class because it felt like play. Something changed in secondary school, it was a mixture of maturing and coming to discover my role models: Bruce Lee, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jordan. I was obsessed with the one-inch punch and would practice it repetitively – reviewing, questioning, imagining, and solidifying every movement… I always try to position martial arts in context, and I think Buddhist philosophy is really important in this respect.”
Integrating Invisible Architectures
Qi Gong (气功) is a worldview in motion. A philosophy of presence and a choreography of breath, it’s what happens when martial discipline, meditative stillness, and poetic intuition converge in the human body. It is traditionally viewed as a mind-body modality that can be used: recreationally, as exercise, for relaxation, preventive medicine, self-cultivation, martial art and as a movement meditation. As a holistic system of thought and practice, it aims to cultivate and balance life energy, especially for health and wellbeing.
Qigong is a romanisation of “Qi” and “Gong”; Qi refers to air, gas or breath, but is often translated as the metaphysical concept of “vital energy”; a more general definition refers to heat, light and electromagnetic energy, as well as the relationship between matter and mind. In this sense, Qi is the central underlying principle in traditional Chinese medicine and martial arts. “Gong” (or kung) is often translated as cultivation or work, and definitions include: practice, skill, mastery, merit, achievement, service, result, or accomplishment, and it is often used to refer to gongfu (kung fu) in the traditional sense of achievement through great effort.
In traditional Chinese cosmology, Qi (氣) is the fundamental fabric of reality, the medium through which all things arise, transform, and dissolve. In this worldview, your body is not an isolated machine but a somatic living node in a vast and pulsing universe. Qi Gong is the means by which that connection becomes conscious. You don’t “do” Qi Gong so much as become aware of what is already happening inside you: the tides of your breath, the heat of emotion, the rivers of tension you’ve learned to ignore. It’s the opposite of control. It’s communion.
There are thousands of styles and forms of Qi Gong: some martial, some medical, some mystical. But all share the same foundational principles: Breath Regulation (Tiao Xi – calming and extending the breath until it becomes the metronome of your nervous system); Movement and Posture (Tiao Shen – soft, spiralling motions or static postures that align the body’s meridians like tuning a harp); Mental Focus (Tiao Xin – a kind of relaxed concentration that blurs the line between attention and surrender).
Qi Gong offers an alternative operating system by returning attention to the body and then expanding the body into environment. It collapses the binary between inner and outer, mental and physical, spiritual and scientific. As a deeply ecological practice, it restores awareness of interoception and interconnection – not as metaphor, but as felt experience. Tianhao Xu’s integration of Qi Gong maps affective topographies, showing that Qi Gong isn’t just a health regimen or esoteric hobby – but a language. And one that the body speaks fluently, if we let it.
There’s a reason so many holistic traditions are rooted in breath and movement. In a world that tries to fragment our attention and turn our bodies into tools of production, to breathe with intention is an act of resistance, to move slowly is an act of refusal, and to feel deeply is an act of return. In this light, Qi Gong isn’t ancient – it’s timely. And in artists like Tianhao Xu, we see it entering a new chapter: one that doesn’t mimic the old forms, but listens to them.
