I believe every life is my parent,
I should respect and critical love.
Owa Mesa
Bio, 2002. 出生于新疆与甘肃交界，现居柏林。常以行为、绘画、摄影、影像捕捉小确幸，因而为公共正义蓄能，破恐惧泡影。日常训练：以虚空为鼎，运三昧真火观一切颠倒妄想，关灯拉屎。
她成长于一个多民族共居、同时受到高度社会管控的地区。不同文化、民族、欲望与社会力量在日常生活中交错，也使她很早意识到：看似整洁、有序的公共空间背后，可能同时存在警察力量、监控、社会控制，以及人与人之间难以言说的紧张关系。
2019年，Mesa进入中央戏剧学院学习戏剧表演。传统的戏剧训练让她逐渐意识到，自己真正想探索的并不是如何扮演一个角色，而是身体本身的经验实践，这意味着带着愿望与觉察进入具体的生活。2021年，她开始在剧场做吧台工作，并在那里接触到当代艺术家与行为艺术。2022年，因为公共事件的契机，她开始独立发展艺术实践，作为表达的路径。
这一转变也与她离开家乡后的经验有关。当她离开熟悉的环境，开始从远处重新观看自己的成长之地时，曾经习以为常的多民族共居、文化交融、冲突与社会管控，逐渐成为她持续思考的问题。早期的创作（2015、2021-2023）因此带有较强的公共性：她从警察社会、公民社会、性别与社会结构等宏观问题出发，通过行为艺术直接进入现实。
但随着实践的发展，Mesa逐渐意识到，她并不希望“公共表达”目的占据创作的全部，她之所以创作，是因为她之所以创作。她开始重新回到非常微小、私人甚至没有明确意义的经验，画、照片与不被记录分享的生活行为是这些游戏，朋友说是 little joys。公共性的视角没有消失，而是从作品的主题逐渐转化为一种观看世界的方法。
作为跨性别者，她持续从自己的身体经验观察社会如何运作。性别不仅是一种身份，也是一套被广泛使用的社会互动机制。人们往往依据熟悉的性别剧本去理解彼此；当一个身体偏离这些熟悉的剧本时，它便可能成为一种“未知”，并引发他人的投射——欲望、好奇、恐惧、想象,,,或其他无法被准确命名的情绪。对Mesa而言，这种经验提供了一个具体的入口，使她能够观察个人身体与更大的社会结构之间如何相互作用。
恐惧因此成为她近年来持续关注的一个概念。她关注恐惧如何来自未知，如何来源于嗔恨的攻击情绪被提前设置自我防御，又如何被社会、媒体、身份分类与政治结构不断制造、投射和放大；同时实践个体是否能够通过直接的身体经验，让这些恐惧松动。她的实践并不试图简单地解释恐惧，而更倾向于创造一种具体的情境，并在身体层面经历它，而反固有情景。
禅修也逐渐成为Mesa工作的重要部分。她并不把自己理解为一个固定不变的主体，也不相信存在一个独立、恒定的“自我”。对她而言，Owa Mesa更像一个正在消融的雪人：一个暂时形成、不断变化、最终也会消失的概念。因此，如果必须用一个具体的行动来描述她的艺术实践与态度，那可能是：关灯拉屎。
它既不是一个需要被解释的隐喻，也不是一个固定的方法，而是一种可以通过体验具身理解的状态。
2024年，Mesa通过《Discussion (chatGPT& Mesa)》开始进一步探索语言、人工智能与“个人意志”的关系。在作品中，她以胡言乱语与AI进行交流，使语言失去明确的意义，并观察一个看似具有意志的系统如何回应一个同样无法被固定解释的主体。这一实践获得德国歌德学院「最勇敢前瞻」奖项，并成为她之后持续研究人工智能、语言与存在关系的起点。
2025年，Mesa离开中国，在泰国清迈开始了近半年的驻地生活。清迈作为一个佛教文化深厚、对身体与性别更为开放的环境，给予她回到身体惯性的可能，一个女性气质更多的自己。作为一个从小在女性气质与女性社群中成长的孩子，Ladyboy作为一种社会坐标，也得以更自然地成为自己。
她开始穿着鲜艳张扬的衣服，独自走上夜晚的街头站着，当有人靠近时，她便疯狂跳舞，以让人不靠近。这个过程后来发展为作品《Beautiful Foot Skin》，并于2026年在柏林 Radical Empathy 展览中展出。此后，Ladyboy成为Mesa具体的社会坐标。
2026年，Mesa入选柏林 ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics 驻地项目，并发展《A Community with a Shared Future for Pee》。她从“人类命运共同体”这一政治概念出发，将抽象的“共同体”重新带回身体，实践一种不依赖语言的共处本源。
目前，Mesa继续通过行为、绘画、影像、与综合艺术项目实践工作。
Owa Mesa
Bio, 2002. Born near the border of Xinjiang and Gansu, China. Now based in Berlin.
She grew up in a region where many ethnic groups lived together, while the area was also under strong social control. Different cultures, ethnicities, desires, and social forces crossed each other in everyday life. From an early age, this made her aware that behind public spaces that look clean and orderly, there can also be police power, surveillance, social control, and tensions between people that are difficult to speak about.
In 2019, Mesa began studying acting at the Central Academy of Drama. Through traditional theatre training, she gradually realized that what she really wanted to explore was not how to play a role, but the experience of the body itself: entering real life with desire and awareness.
In 2021, she began working at a bar in a theatre, where she encountered contemporary artists and performance art. In 2022, after a series of public events, she left that environment and began developing her own art practice as a way of expression.
This change was also connected to her experience of leaving her hometown. Once she left the environment she had grown up in and began looking back at it from a distance, things that had once seemed normal — people from different ethnic groups living together, cultural mixing, conflict, and social control — gradually became questions that stayed with her.
Her early work therefore had a strong public side. She started from larger questions around the police state, civil society, gender, and social structures, and entered these questions directly through performance.
But as her practice developed, Mesa gradually realized that she did not want public expression to become the purpose of everything she made.
She makes art because she makes art.
She began to return to very small, private, and sometimes meaningless experiences. Painting, taking photographs, and doing things in everyday life that were never recorded or shared became a kind of game. Her friends call these moments “little joys.”
The public side of her practice did not disappear. Instead, it slowly moved from being the subject of her work to becoming a way of looking at the world.
As a transgender person, Mesa continues to look at how society works through her own experience of the body. Gender is not only an identity. It is also a widely used system for interacting with other people.
People often understand each other through familiar gender roles and scripts. When a body does not fit these familiar scripts, it can become something unknown. This can bring out desire, curiosity, fear, imagination, or other feelings that are difficult to name.
For Mesa, this experience gives her a direct way to look at the relationship between an individual body and larger social structures. Her experience is also shaped by the way society and politics have increasingly intervened in, defined, and controlled transgender identities. What happens to a transgender body is therefore never only personal. It is also connected to the larger ways society decides how bodies should be understood.
Fear has become another idea that Mesa has continued to work with in recent years.
She is interested in how fear can come from the unknown, how anger can turn into an early form of self-defense, and how fear can be created, projected, and amplified by society, media, identity categories, and political structures.
At the same time, she asks whether a person can use direct physical experience to loosen these fears.
Her work does not try to simply explain fear. Instead, she tends to create a specific situation and experience it through the body, while also going against the fixed situation that has already been given.
Meditation has gradually become an important part of Mesa’s practice.
She does not understand herself as a fixed and unchanging subject, and she does not believe that there is an independent and permanent “self.”
For her, Owa Mesa is more like a snowman that is slowly melting: a concept that takes shape for a while, keeps changing, and eventually disappears.
So if she had to describe her artistic practice and attitude through one concrete action, it might be:
turning off the light and taking a shit.
It is not a metaphor that needs to be explained. It is not a fixed method either. It is simply a state that can be understood through experience and through the body.
In 2024, Mesa began to explore the relationship between language, artificial intelligence, and “personal will” through Discussion (ChatGPT & Mesa).
In the work, she communicates with AI through gibberish. Language loses its clear meaning, while she observes how a system that seems to have a will responds to a person who also cannot be fully fixed or explained.
The work received the Goethe-Institut’s “Most Courageous Visionary” award in Germany and became a starting point for her continued exploration of AI, language, and existence.
In 2025, Mesa left China and spent nearly half a year in Chiang Mai, Thailand, as a resident.Chiang Mai, with its 🪷 culture and a more open environment around the body and gender, gave her the possibility of returning to the habits of her own body and to a more feminine version of herself.
Having grown up around femininity and women’s communities, she found that Ladyboy, as a social position, could also become a more natural way of understanding herself.
She began wearing bright and expressive clothes and standing alone on the streets at night. When someone came close, she would suddenly dance wildly so that they would not come closer.
This later developed into Beautiful Foot Skin, which was exhibited in Berlin in 2026 as part of Radical Empathy.
After this, Ladyboy became a concrete social position through which Mesa could understand herself.
In 2026, Mesa was selected for the residency program at ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics in Berlin, where she developed A Community with a Shared Future for Pee.
Starting from the political concept of “a community with a shared future for mankind,” she brings the abstract idea of “community” back to the body, practicing a form of coexistence that does not depend on language.
Mesa currently continues to work through performance, painting, video, and interdisciplinary art projects.