Mimi Xu has built a distinctive career, establishing herself as a composer, producer, performer, musical director, and acclaimed DJ. Her work spans feature films, fashion films, installation pieces, and catwalks—testament to her eclectic and unconventional musical background.
Born into a world of classical and experimental music, Xu was profoundly influenced by her father, the renowned French-Chinese acoustic architect Albert Yaying Xu. Her passion for the transformative power of sound took root at an early age through her piano studies. She later pursued architecture and journalism before transitioning into the music industry, working with various record labels. This period shaped her DJ career and led to the creation of Mimi Xu Studio — a multidisciplinary platform dedicated to original music composition for film, fashion, and live performance. Through the studio, Xu has created soundtracks for major fashion houses, featuring guest appearances from Lana Del Rey, Kylie Minogue, and Rose Byrne, among others — underscoring her ability to bridge cinematic narrative, sound design, and contemporary culture. As a DJ, she has performed for selected fashion and cultural institutions, including Prada, Miu Miu, Marni, Hermès, Zimmermann and Dazed & Confused, Another Magazine as well as at major events such as Art Basel, Cannes Film Festival, Serpentine Gallery Summer Party, Frieze, Panorama Bar at Berghain, and Houghton Festival.
In addition to these extensive credits Xu continues to push boundaries, creating site-specific mixed media performances at cultural destinations including Meltdown Festival, The Royal Academy of Arts, The Barbican, Gagosian Gallery, Oberlin Conservatory, and collaborated with visual artists such as Carlota Guerrero, Weirdcore, United Visual Artist and the legendary choreographer Lindsay Kemp—Marcel Marceau’s protégé, known for staging 'Ziggy Stardust' and mentoring David Bowie and Kate Bush—before Kemp's passing. Xu participated in 'REBEL: 30 Years of London Fashion' exhibition at the Design Museum and scored the 'Show' installation last year.
She recently recorded a modern classical radio show on NTS and world premiered her debut symphonic composition, Sānshuǐ - Three Waters in memory of her father at Weiwuying- National Kaohsiung Center for the Art in Taiwan last December. Early 2025, Xu was nominated for Best Original Score at the Sundance Film Festival for the feature film LUZ, directed by Flora Lau, and was selected for the ASCAP Composer Spotlight of the Year. Xu is currently scoring her second feature film and writing her next album.
Shaped by a childhood immersed in opera and diverse performance arts, Mimi has developed a practice centered on creating performance works in which sound, dramaturgy, and visual narrative are in constant dialogue. Her compositional inspiration ranges from Baroque music to musique concrète and electronic music, bridging atonal and tonal languages as well as classical and techno influences, often translating sonic structures into striking visual and spatial experiences.
Xu’s practice also probes the sensory and psychological dimensions of listening, mobilising psychoacoustics as both method and metaphor. Her current performance project, RESONANCE, operates as a living sound sculpture in which science-informed frequency protocols are interwoven with live electronic composition and structured audience participation. Within this calibrated sonic biosphere, selected frequencies are used to modulate attention and invite meditative states, generating an ongoing, data-driven investigation into how sound shapes perception and embodied experience.
In parallel to her work under Mimi Xu, she also founded Awkward Moments in 2017, the electronic duo comprising of her and MAGUIRE - multi instrumentalist and lead vocalist. The pair layer interweaving electronic beats over organic instruments and atmospheric vocals to mirror the relationship between the tangible and the ethereal; between fragmentation and order. This concept is further explored visually using multimedia projection of abstract moving imagery. In the words of Virginia Woolf - 'I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream.' This is their attempt to recreate that stream of existence through sound experiments and psychedelic visual journeys. Their debut 6 track LP 'An Entropic Cycle' released in March 2020 explores the theory of Eternal Recurrence, probing questions about the cyclical nature of existence, never aiming to repeat, but always returning to the primary concerns of fluidity and transience. They followed this with ’An Entropic Remix EP’ and a track on the k7 compilation album ‘Ambient Layers’. In addition Awkward Moments also host a radio show 'An Entropic Hour' on OpenLab Radio. The duo just released EP1 of an ongoing remix art project entitled ‘Life on Venus – Remixed & Reimagined’ and released their ambient neo-classical album SIX SEASONS in July 2023.
They collaborated with visual artist Weirdcore for their new multimedia performance, premiered at Houghton Festival last year. They have recently scored the trailer music for Francis Ford Coppola’s latest film MEGALOPOLIS using the third eye chakra solfeggio frequency 852 Hz that promotes spiritual healing and just released their new album Strange Odyssey in September 2025.
Mimi Xu has been featured in international media outlets, including The Financial Times, Vogue US, Vogue UK, Vogue China, W Magazine, T Magazine, and CNN.
CONTACT
info@mimixu.com