Xingzi Gu is a younger painter who depicts a vaporous realm wherein the stable and ethereal overlap. Combining delicate strains and bleeding clouds of luminous shade, Gu depicts her youthful figures in a dreamlike world the place intimacy and loneliness really feel inseparable. In “Orange Bed room” (2023–24), we see a frontal view of two nude figures on the left facet, their eyes closed, one leaning towards the opposite. Each are smoking. Above them hangs a yellow lamp, whereas on the appropriate, architectural particulars are painted in sooty blacks atop the glowing orange-red floor. Whereas the lamp suggests the house of a room, the architectural renderings posit the likelihood that no barrier between inside and outside exists. Though bodily touching, the figures inhabit separate inside worlds.
“Orange Bed room” is one in every of eight work within the artist’s debut exhibition, Xingzi Gu: Pure Coronary heart Corridor at Lubov gallery. I grew to become inquisitive about Gu’s artwork once I was invited to critique college students within the MFA program at New York College in December 2023. What struck me in regards to the artist’s pupil work was how little it intersected with the tendencies within the New York artwork world. I discovered that she was born in China to artist mother and father and that she had attended each center college and highschool in Whangaparaoa School in New Zealand, studied artwork on the College of Auckland, and was on a one-year trade program at Stony Brook College, New York, earlier than transferring to the College of the Artwork Institute of Chicago. At NYU, Gu handled topics she has continued to discover: isolation, adolescence on the cusp of bodily change, and intimate relationships between youths and older generations. Whereas the imagery generally bordered on sentimentality or cliche, in her greatest works she made the themes into one thing extra affecting and loaded.
In latest work, Gu continues to look at the circumstances of disaffection and powerlessness as felt by people who find themselves of their 20s or youthful, one thing she achieves by utilizing shade symbolically and creating totally different ranges of legibility to counsel that actuality is layered and disconnected. It isn’t farfetched to attach this topic to the current state of China’s youth, who’re conscious of the rising shortage of job openings for school graduates, however I additionally assume this view is simply too limiting. That is one cause I discover the work so participating — via portray and drawing, Gu evolves her inspiration into one thing bigger and extra open-ended.
In “Sunny, gentle afternoon” (2023–24), Gu depicts a younger woman sporting a pale violet costume and carrying a backpack. She is centered within the portray, her ft touching the underside edge. She appears to be strolling on the road, the flowering branches of a cherry blossom tree forming a roof over her head. The juxtaposition of the younger college woman and cherry blossoms types the center of the portray. In conventional Chinese language tradition, cherry blossoms are related to femininity — and the craving for love. What does the longer term maintain for the woman? What potentialities await a younger girl rising up within the gerontocracy of China, or for that matter within the more and more illiberal United States, the place Florida has handed a regulation banning Chinese language residents with out inexperienced playing cards from shopping for property within the state?
Whereas “Sunny, gentle afternoon” by no means immediately refers to those circumstances, it permits for the connections to be made. The doorways of the longer term could also be opening, however what does it imply to go from the relative freedom of childhood to a lifetime of obeisance to powers that care little to your well-being or happiness. This consciousness, and the attendant anxieties and emotions of loneliness, hang-out Gu’s work, imbuing them with sentiment however not sentimentality. Dwelling within the diaspora, Gu is totally conscious of being adrift, guided solely by her artwork.
In “Lili Pond” (2023–24), a blue-haired, bare-chested adolescent boy in checkered pants or a towel poses towards a vaporous inexperienced floor with a horizon line close to the highest of the canvas. Is he in a panorama or a dream? Geese appear to drift on both facet of him. Geese mate for all times, and are a logo of affection and constancy in China. Will the boy discover a lifelong associate? Is that what he desires? Whereas this may occasionally have been a purpose of earlier generations, it’s much less so now.
Gu’s topics belong to both Gen Z or Gen Alpha. They had been marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, local weather change, terrorism, and steady international battle. She doesn’t allude to any of those world occasions, however she summons the sense of isolation that appears prevalent amongst individuals below 30. Even after we see a pair in a second of intimacy, as in “Untitled (Cherry Coke or Ocean Flame)” (2024), there’s something disquieting in regards to the diaphanous environment and using crimson and mauve, suggesting blood. The crimson sky above the 2 younger individuals mendacity collectively infuses the scene with a way of impending doom, and defines a view that seems minimize off from the world. The stress between moments of quiet pleasure and inevitable calamity is riveting.
Xingzi Gu: Pure Coronary heart Corridor continues at Lubov gallery (5 East Broadway, #402, Decrease East Aspect, Manhattan) via July 13. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.