Xavier Cha's performance-based works and videos grapple with architectures of subjectivity, illusions of agency, what it means to be human with a physical body in a capitalistic-digital age where we exist as consumer and product. Collaboration is central to the work. Specialized participants, generally performers in fields outside of the contemporary art world, play prominent roles in extracting the sublimated and magnifying an estranged or alienated human experience within inescapable systems of exchange, consumption, and communication. Cha directs actors, dancers, or other professionals through focused, controlled scenarios, where the challenged expression of their expertise- often pushing performers to extremes- reveals the body as an enigmatic conduit, a malleable corporeal/ psycho/ social system. Attuned to ways in which the body is watched, and conveyed, immersed within heightened circuits of surveillance, marketing, voyeurism and self-spectatorship, Cha examines how mediating frames- screens, sets, and the omnipotent lens of the camera- shape behaviors and refine gesture.