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A Whole Night . Xiao He. March 8 - April 12, 2025. Debut solo exhibition.

4478 W Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016.

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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 we met: 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 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 her painting: 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. Looking through the cracks at unprivate scenes too quickly sublimated to tell beauty, from violence, from love.

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

Even when I look away I see the flickering of a phosphorescent tenderness. A serene-siren warbling flutters all extremes of feeling and unforgetting along each stroke (each glint): oscillating between a frenetic action or sudden gesture, and a precise vision—or a precious distance of a gaze. There’s a sense of someone being in the dark but seeking, and often finding, the light. A howl placed like a ribbon where the night is also a sun, and where the sun is also a night. With all the light of a whole night. And all the sound of the stars that call the night black and blue. All night: is the place opened-up along this body: the mercurial film of the gaze, and the distant intimacy it unfolds between someone and seeing. Some of the paintings are watching movies, some are reading books, some are remembering memories (distilled into images). Some (all) are looking at life. 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 the length of what light eclipses, what darkness holds near—A Whole Night, traveling the distance of a gaze.

Seeing her work is changing everything around me, changing how I see.

I see what’s so precious isn’t the painting, isn’t the object, isn’t the thing….  What’s so precious is the chance, the melancholic falling (into place): the timing. Vertigo.

What’s so precious is that I see myself looking. That I’m exchanged. Or that I see myself looking as someone else, that my whole expanse runs along my gaze until it becomes somewhere else. (That there’s footage of me caught in the act.)

What’s so precious is that I’m drawn to the light (so I can see). Suddenly but slowly the source of my life and the source of my longing align. An eclipse: because the light is too bright so it becomes a blindspot, swapping me for a moth: I think it’s the sun. (You think I’m the sun.)

If there’s anything precious it’s all the distance of the double life that divides me from myself, so I only ever find what I want in pieces. So I only find needles made of haystacks.

So I see myself strewn but only all the forgetting can keep all of the parts together. So I only know you because memory holds us far enough apart.

Because at night everything that’s missing between us is what keeps us so close. Or as far away as a shadow from its source; where a body beams a hole where day becomes night against me.

Tripling the two: \ | /

Or, in the morning: when forgetting starts the memory of a dream.

“All night I make night in me.” All night you make day in me.

(Or, if I didn’t lack you I wouldn’t be nearby.)

Or, if it is whole, when is a night? What does a night contain? When does it start and stop? What are its limits?

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observations from the night

When the moon tells us the sun is somewhere else, it shows me its face by turning away. Only the yellow blare of a lupine melancholia can tell the difference between who’s looking. A signal. Otherwise there’s only clockwork keeping count. There’s only turning toward and away. But the turning keeps going one direction, clockwise. (There’s a projected plane, a jutting-out.)

There’s looking, seeing, watching, gazing(, scanning), longing.

0. Or, during the day the sun is a hole: it’s too bright to be seen, to be looked-at directly. I turn away from the sun. All the light comes from nothing. (Zero.)

1. Or, during the night all the suns are punctured: it’s too dark to see anything, except what’s missing. The hole that was the sun surrounds me and I know that because it’s shadow lets me look over its boundary. Because I’m plucked from its center. I turn toward the night. (I turn toward where the light use to be.) All the light comes from nothing. (Infinity.)

All this turning in the night. All this turning is the night.

Or, 

“[…] All night I hear the voice of someone seeking me out. All night you abandon me slowly like the water that sobs slowly falling. All night I write luminous messages, messages of rain, all night someone checks for me and I check for someone.

         The noise of steps in the circle near this choleric light birthed from my insomnia. Steps of someone who no longer writhes, who no longer writes. All night someone holds back, then crosses the circle of bitter light.

         All night I drown in your eyes become my eyes. All night I prod myself on toward that squatter in the circle of my silence. All night I see something lurch toward my looking, something humid, contrived of silence launching the sound of someone sobbing. […]”*

After all, there’s night if any two distinct points lie on exactly one line. If, any two distinct lines meet in exactly one point. (Eclipsed.) If, there exist four points, no three of which are collinear.

Or, a parallel projection where the object is rotated along one or more of its axes relative to the plane of projection, so that multiple sides are visible, and the scale along each axis is preserved (though it may differ between axes).

Then, a whole night is a hole placed in a blind spot (so we can see). Like the point or seam of infinity plucked from the rail-roaded perspective along a projective plane, the night limits the entire field of vision, the length of a day and the distance of looking. Like a whole night, it is precisely an incompleteness—a present absence--that sustains the continual turning-away of the painting as soon as I turn towards it. The incompleteness seems to complete the scene, to contain my gaze: to endlessly limit my looking.

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on the surface

What defines the limits of a night, where it starts and stops? When does a whole night contain?

If I wake-up in a dark room in the middle of the night, the first thing I do is frantically reach-out to find an edge. Some end to me—or some start to somewhere or to something else. If I look at a painting the first thing I do is find its limits, see where it ends. Find where it reaches me—from where I’m approached. I try to find where I am along the surface of the darkness that suspends my animations in reaches, gasps, howls, and yawns. I’m sprawled.

If all my looking runs infinitely beyond me (or into me, into my dreams),

if day and night are different sides of my body,

(if saying “day” and “night” mouths what’s missing the same way as the horizon,)

if waking divides my sequence with sleeping,

am I the limit?... am I the border of the night?

All of these questions take place on a surface—this surface. The surface of the page, of the screen, of the looking…. Of the night.

And if I’m along the surface of the gaze I’m placed there as a hole. My looking starts from somewhere I cannot see; my looking ends somewhere I cannot see. (I only see where my looking leaves my body.) Yet, despite this limitless, these limit-points are contained by the fact that my view is partial, fractured, fragmented. Framed by an infinite distance. There’s an undecidability that lets me know my limitations but leaves me wondering where all the rest if it goes, where it’s all gone….

I’ll have to check the drainage: How do I find my way around this hole? What is this punctured surface? What is this jutting-out or diving-into a void? How do I follow a line until it becomes a hole? Or, if I step further back (from the drain): what is this ‘projective plane,’ this place where I’m shown where’s vanished?

{To be continued….}

[—80. March 2025. (v3p1.)]

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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 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.

Works by Xiao have been shown in previous group exhibitions and fair presentations with the gallery, including: Other Days (2024), There’s no telling time (2024), To Market, to market (San Francisco Art Fair 2024), and Good Grounds, Drowned Meadows (Hamptons Fine Art Fair 2024).

{Support of this exhibition is in part provided by artist grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation.}

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References:

*Alejandra Pizarnik, "[All night I hear the noise of  water sobbing.]" from The Galloping Hour: French Poems (2018). Translated by Patricio Ferrari and Forrest Gander.

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