Xiao He

We are grateful and honored to share this time with Xiao.

There's something so rare and so precious about a chance encounter. That's how I met Xiao: she came into our previous gallery-space located on La Cienega Boulevard (along that strip of galleries there). A conversation was sparked and we connected. But it was an affinity produced through the works, by being in the space—something materially and momentarily shared between us, with nothing staked except for the enjoyment of being somewhere with someone else; looking, longing, and remembering. (I've always loved that about being around art—there's a kind of connection made that seems like it might never happen anywhere else, a conversation that could never happen without the art and without the serendipity of a chance encounter.)

Since meeting Xiao that day we have included her work in past group shows There's no telling time and Other Days (as well as in a couple of Art Fair presentations in San Francisco and the Hamptons). Her work is always changing.

The name of this debut solo exhibition, A Whole Night, is borrowed from one of the film's that inspired this new body of work: Toute une nuit (1982) by Chantal Akerman. Others—other people, other places, other times—always populate Xiao's practice. The chance of seeing something, of running-into someone or something—of catching a glimpse like a "slipping glimpser"—seems to be one of the repeating movements of Xiao's paintings: looking, recording, running: a nearly endless series of processing and transforming the scenes that populate her world. Catching-hold of an image only to let it go in the same instant. Everything she sees, touches, becomes something else by roiling the seams between herself and someone or somewhere else—between what she sees and how she sees it.

(We've never met someone who works so intensely, so lovingly.)

A fearless tenderness, a serene intimacy with all extremes of feeling and experience is seen in each stroke oscillating between a frenetic action or gesture, and a precise vision or precious distance of a gaze. There’s a sense of someone being in the dark but seeking, and often finding, the light. A place where the “night is also a sun,” and where the sun is also a night. All the light of a whole night. The stars that call the night black and blue. This, I think, is the place opened-up of this new body of work: the preciousness of the gaze, and the distant intimacy it unfolds between someone and seeing. Some of the paintings are looking at scenes from films, some are reading books, some are remembering memories (distilled into images). All wound around a longing gaze that can’t be undone. A longing to see; to see home; to see family; to see somewhere else: and to be seen. To see what light eclipses, what darkness holds near—A Whole Night, traveling the distance of a gaze.

Her work is changing everything around me, changing how I see.

Xiao He (b. 1998, Chengdu, China) Xiao He is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in San Francisco. Xiao holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has completed an online drawing development year at the Royal Drawing School London. Her recent exhibitions include 2024 Reisig and Taylor Contemporary in Los Angeles, 2023 4C Gallery in Los Angeles, 2022 Art Capital in Paris, France, Upstream Gallery in New York, USA, Huacui Contemporary Art Center in Shanghai, China, and Zhou B Art Center in Chicago, USA. Her artist interviews have been featured in Al-Tiba9 Art Magazine, ShoutoutLA and VoyageLA, along with residencies awarded at the Cubberley Artist Studio Program in 2024 and the Kala Art Institute in 2023. Her mixed-media artists' book, "A Collection of Random Thoughts," is part of the permanent collection of the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection in Chicago.