Xin Qiao: I Like to Be Your Gift

A solo exhibition by Xin Qiao exploring intimacy, love, and devotion through paintings and a gallery space designed as a gift box. About To be your gift is not merely to hand oneself over to another; it is to make a free, brave and steadfast choice about one's own life. The works in this exhibition grow out of a sustained experience and imagining of intimacy. Here, love is not only a subject to be depicted; it is also the artist's way of thinking about, and pursuing, a life. Through plane brights of colour, clear and fluent lines, and candid figures and body language, Qiao Xin gives form to the small, fleeting emotions and direct sensory experiences of intimate relationships, and to a naive, stubborn devotion to love, so that loving and being loved become gifts that can be seen, touched and kept. The exhibition space is conceived as a gift box prepared for the viewer. Ribbons, wood grain and the arrangement of the works together form an intimate field somewhere between private experience and public display. Within it, each painting is both a record of feeling and an act of giving. A gift is a ritual of giving, and a metaphor for a relationship. When we try to build a bond with another person, what is it we are really giving: an object, a memory, or a self willing to open up to the other? Inside this gift box the works are unwrapped, while loving and being loved remain a task that takes a lifetime to complete. Read more Toggle Painting