ICON

QIU XIAOFEI

THE THEATER OF WITHER AND THRIVE

Qiu Xiaofei presents new paintings and works on paper inspired by his discovery of previously unknown family photographs—a cache of images uncovered after the death of the artist’s father.

His work gives shape to these phenomena, drawing on Chinese cultural and philosophical traditions, as well as the influence of poets Robert Lowell and Emily Dickinson. Nostalgia, loss and wonder are distilled into compositions that suggest the vastness of the theater of life: presence and absence, prosperity and decline, grand histories and individual emotions gyre in the tidal dramas of human experience.

The family photographs Qiu found among his late father’s belongings form the psychological engine of this new body of work. The stories of love and loss captured in heretofore undeveloped rolls of silver-halide film, peeling and oxidized from the passage of time, set in motion the artist’s broader consideration of the cycle of life.

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