Xiao He

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Recent and Current Exhibitions:

July 11 - July 14, 2024.

Hamptons Fine Art Fair

Good Grounds, Drowned Meadows.

Claudia Rega, Xiao He, objet A.D, Chris Reisig and Leeza Taylor

Political-Economy Project.

Available Works:

+ Checklist.

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April 25 - April 28, 2024.

San Francisco Art Fair

To Market, to market

Xiao He, Rudik Ovsepyan, objet A.D, Chris Reisig and Leeza Taylor

Political-Economy Project.

Available Works:

+ Checklist

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April 13 - May 18, 2024.

There’s no telling time

Jackie Castillo, Shabez Jamal, Sarah Plummer, Xiao He, Cesar Herrejon, Magaly Cantú.

Group Exhibition.

Release:

+ File; Curate LA

Press:

+ Feature (LA Art Party: April 13, 2024).

+ This Week’s Must-See Art (Curate LA: April 11-17, 2024).

+ LA Art Openings & Spotlight (ArtRabbit: April 10, 2024).

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March 2 - April 6, 2024.

Other Days

Claudia Rega, Frantz Jean-baptiste, Grant Falardeau, Xiao He, Daniela Soberman, Rudik Ovsepyan, Sinclair Vicisitud.

Group Exhibition.

Documentation:

+ Checklist

Release:

+ File; Curate LA

Press:

+ This Week’s Must-See Art (Curate LA: February 29-March 6, 2024)

+ LA Art Openings & Spotlight (ArtRabbit: February 28, 2024).

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Bio

Xiao He (b. 1998, Chengdu, China) 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 a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. Xiao’s works have been exhibited internationally, including 2022 Art Capital (Paris, France), 2021 Biennale di Genova (Genoa, Italy), Upstream Gallery (New York, USA), Huacui Contemporary Art Center (Shanghai, China) and Zhou B Art Center (Chicago, USA). Her artist interviews have been featured on Al-Tiba9 Art Magazine, VoyageLA, and Vogue China, along with residencies awarded at the Cubberley Artist Studio Program (2024) and Kala Art Institute (2023). Her mixed media artists’ book A Collection of Random Thoughts is now part of the permanent collection of Joan Flasch Artists’ Book collection in Chicago. Xiao is also a member of Oil Painters of America and served on the Apex Art New York jury panel.

{Biographical Text Courtesy of the Artist}

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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.

Literature is my main source of inspiration. Short fiction, such as 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' as well as non-fiction works like 'Regretting Motherhood,' are all starting points for my concept development. Using everyday materials familiar from my Chinese upbringing, such as fabrics, thread, tights, incense, and grains, I aim to form a personal yet collective reflection on the role of women in domestic life, historically and contemporarily. I hope my viewers can resonate with the works and create both intimate and universal dialogues with them.”

{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 ongoing 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.

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Exhibitions with the Gallery: