Xiao He

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Exhibition Images and Recordings: View.

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Current Exhibition:

March 8 - April 12, 2025. Winter-Spring.

A Whole Night

+ Reference: Checklist.

+ Release: File.

+ Press: This Week’s Must-See Art (Curate LA: March 6-11, 2025): Interview with Xiao He by Zou Chen, “Xiao He: The Double Life of a Painter” (Open Art: March 11, 2025).

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NEWS

+ Xiao He was recently awarded an artist grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation.

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Bio

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.

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<<My name is Xiao He—"He" as in "congratulate" and "Xiao" as in "small." I'm from Chengdu and came to the United States at 16, first landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I loved it there, and although I've lived in many cities since, I still consider Santa Fe my second home. Later, I studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, went through some other experiences, then returned to creating art while also doing other things. Now I live in San Francisco.>>

(Excerpt from Interview by Zou Chen, courtesy of Open Art and Xiao He.)

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“In my works, I explore the relationships between domesticity and femininity. Through drawing, artist’s books, and installations, I reflect on the layered and often mixed feelings surrounding family, marriage, and motherhood.”

{Biographical Text and Statement Courtesy of the Artist}

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I first met Xiao He when she visited the gallery during the exhibition “A Tender Limb” in February 2024. (She was visiting Los Angeles from San Francisco.) We quickly struck-up conversation about the show and discussed the ways in which that particular exhibition works with bodily spaces, nonhuman others, domestic furnishings, decorative acts, feminine aesthetics, and visual languages. We also talked about the importance of sources, and how each of the artists in that show pulled from intimate, personal, embodied connections to the materials or forms they were working with and how this informed their practices (and the results of their practices). Given the honest clarity of her insights along these lines, it became obvious to me that she herself must have a personal connection to this careful treatment of (re)sources and the relations between image, material, memory, body, and language. And once I saw her work it was immediately evident that this was very much the case. 

The starting-point for her work seems to always begin at its source: a found magazine, a short story, an article of clothing at the store... and I’m sure the list continues to evolve. She is a careful reader of whatever world she inhabits, and the sources she finds in her reading provide an entry into this world. But it also, just as importantly, provides an entry or path for others to travel along the tracks in their own terms. Always returning to the source, her work itself becomes a source. (So I also turned to the source: we met.)

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Xiao He’s painting Hug (2023)—included in the exhibition Other Days—is part of an series of paintings that pore through intimate bodily imagery she initially encounters in vintage (1980s-90s) erotic magazines from Hong Kong found in San Francisco's Chinatown. When she found these magazines, she became curious about the kind of "time-machine" that Chinatown creates in relation to her own personal history growing-up in China. In particular, she became curious about these Hong Kong-published erotic magazines because they were something that someone would not have had access to in China during that same time.

The context in which she arrives at these magazines as barred imagery, and alienated moments of personal intimacy, finds a border of friction between the state and the regulation of how bodies are publicly accessed (or assessed) and how bodies are privately inhabited. But these works also explore where divisions between privates and publics begin to breakdown or involute at the limits of a body (that is, the point at which a body is ordered to be contained). (For example, domestic space is an example of a place or position where a private becomes public by virtue of its regulated socio-economic organization.)

These splittings, parallelings, and inside-outings of realities inside/outside a specific place or a particular moment in time is a theme explored throughout her practice. Working-through historical questions of intimacy and prohibition through the kinds of spaces that are organized by and around bodies, her work focuses on the relationship between femininity and ideas of domestic life and national identity.

[—80. March-April 2024.]

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Exhibitions with the Gallery: