xingzi gu

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

Tinged with melancholy, my work depicts youth figures in quotidian scenes, capturing the intimate tensions within relationships with a focus on coming-of-age experiences surrounding desire, disassembly and displacement. The figures exist in a space where time is slowed, frustrated, fractured, lost, or obstructed, intimate relationships that are on the edge of falling apart. I approach painting as a place where meanings are continuously interpreted, reproduced, or delayed under the influence of time and perception. I wonder how time can exist here as neither linear nor singular, but instead bend, tilt, and distort. I wonder how interrupted time inhabits space and carries its subjects through longing and loneliness. Their connections are built through fragility, while increasingly solitary figures have begun to appear in my recent paintings, reflecting states of separation and retreat. To build my paintings, I combine different painterly techniques, layering traditional and academic methods with experimental uses of ink through staining and wiping. As water-based and oil-based paints provide different textures and depths of color, I utilize oil paint to build volume then blends which with pools of washy ink or acrylic color to delineate depth. The final surface comprises layered brushstrokes of color and line work, figures blur in and out of the background in my work, realism coexists with abstraction as forms entangle and merge through matter and perception.

Artwork