Xiang Fan is an Associate Professor at the School of Art and Design of Tsinghua University, and an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Drawing inspiration from historical and sociological data, she creates generative artworks as a critical means of observing and commenting on the real world. Her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of visual design, interactive experience, computer graphics technology, and digital humanities. In 2016, she began utilizing the CBDB database to generate family trees of ancient Chinese, discovering the patterns and contradictory points in kinship records and visualizing a dynamically growing forest of family trees.

Fan's work "Ancient Chinese Family Tree" was selected for the IEEE VIZ Art Program in 2017 and the Italian Triennial in 2018 (China Pavilion). This project also won the SIGGRAPH 2020 Best Art Paper Award and has since enjoyed a long-term exhibition at the Shanghai Library. Currently, within the CBDB, she is exploring textual sources related to Suzhou Gardens to gain new insights from the complex social networks and develop a deeper understanding of the true social functions of gardens in Chinese culture.