How Japanese Coming-of-Age Films Influenced Painter Xingzi Gu’s New Show

Xingzi Gu arrived in New York by way of Nanjing, Auckland and Chicago. Having lived in four cities as a young painter, sometimes as a self-conscious outsider and other times in self-exile, Xingzi is acutely aware of the alienating forces of a life spent in constant motion. At the same time, coming from the first generation of “digital natives” in China, they’re no stranger to the kinds of images of desire—borderless, flattened, and constantly in flux—floating around on 2000s and 2010s Internet, which provided a sense of companionship for many a lonely teenager. As a result, Xingzi’s sensual yet tender paintings of young men and women caught in moments of intimacy are deeply personal and at the same time reflective of universal archetypes. This past spring, Xingzi opened Pure Heart Hall, their first solo show with Lubov, which has been extended through July 13th. There, aerial bodies entangled with unfamiliar yet intimate flows of affect take center stage, producing theatrical and eerie atmospheres. To mark the occasion, I invited Xingzi for a conversation about painting queerness, taking inspirations from Japanese coming-of-age films, and how it feels to be both closer to the self and othered by desire.

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QINGYUAN DENG: Hi, Xingzi. How are you?

XINGZI GU: I’m good. Thank you for meeting with me today.

DENG: Of course. Well, I want to say first of all, happy Pride Month. There’s so much queerness in your paintings, so I wanted to ask, do you consider yourself queer?

GU: Yes, I consider myself queer and I’m always embracing different types of bodies in my paintings. 

DENG: In your paintings that depict a same-sex relationship, they seem very vivid. They seem so close to heart. You must use a lot of imagination when you depict things of sexual pleasure or desire?

GU: Yeah. The desire and sexual pleasure for me is an exploration of intimacy and tenderness and social relationships, these close connections between people. I explored from my perspective of girlhood in the beginning, and then I tried to step out of my comfort zone and explore relationships between queer or gay men. That’s not something I can really understand, but I’m trying to grasp the same intimacy that I have experienced within my own social relations. I feel like I want to contour the different bodies to explore that space of freedom. I find that exciting.

DENG: That makes sense. You mentioned your focus on the body, and I’ve noticed that all of those young men in your paintings have this homoerotic feeling to them. I’m thinking about that painting where you reference that protagonist from the film, All About Lily Chou-Chou. He was never queer in the film, but there’s something very homoerotic about his intense desire for connectivity, and that translates in your painting. Tell me about the desire to make the figures in your paintings queer, even though they’re not engaging in explicitly queer acts?

GU: Yeah. For me, desire and queerness are interconnected. The character you mentioned is a vulnerable straight teenager. I feel like anything that seems intimate or tender or timid, that space for a tender moment can also be where things can go wrong if it’s not protected. In the film, the teenagers are all very vulnerable, but there are moments of violence because, in society, sometimes teenagers don’t have the proper tools to protect themselves or protect one another. So there is this space of possibility that I want to protect, but also, there is another side of violence I have to acknowledge as well. There’s tenderness, but there’s also a sense of doubt as well.

DENG: That also translates to the female characters in your paintings, but they’re slightly different. I’m reminded of the French leftist collective Tiqqun’s book, Preliminary Materials for the Theory of a Young-Girl, but the book has a depressing take on how advanced capitalism almost colonizes the stereotypical figure of a young girl. The young women in your paintings have this intense desire to achieve more, to connect with other people. And in a way, you’re celebrating their intense desire to fashion themselves.

GU: Thank you for mentioning the book. I’ve read parts of it. I think the book was also touching on Pierre Klossowski, the French painter and writer, and the idea of a living currency. The young girls in capitalized contemporary society become living beings that are seduced to consume. Same as other queer bodies, it’s not only for girls. So, there’s an economy of passion. But what I’m trying to portray in the painting is that the character acknowledges there is a living currency within capitalism, like “another day, another dollar,” that you have to reconcile with the living conditions of the world. But I feel like I want to also explore other possibilities beyond being trapped into this economy to find connectivity outside of the mode that’s being talked about in the book. There’s a fleeting joy, there’s a moment of what’s maybe “pure connection,” but there is also the economy or the capitalistic desire within that connection as well. So I want to go beyond this economy of passion to go into more of a space, a freedom of connection, even though it’s always going to be polluted.

DENG: I want to talk a little bit more about the seduction of images. You reference so many different images in your paintings and it seems situated within this global online image culture. You reference images from films, from contemporary art, from Instagram, or just images you took on your phone of your friends. Tell me about the way you are attracted to images and how you translate images into paintings.

GU: I feel like there’s not a specific formula for me to choose what images I’m attracted to. Whatever images resonate with me, I use as a reference for the painting. Sometimes a friend from my hometown posts a photo on Instagram and I will be like, “That resonates.” But also, sometimes it’s people in New York. I find an image just walking down the street, or from a film I saw recently. I don’t want to put criteria for what images I choose, I want to keep it as open as possible. But whatever brings the affective mode in me that I want to connect with, I will put in my paintings.

DENG: It really seems like you’re trying to get away from the history of high art when you’re painting. It references more democratic, populist subcultures. You mentioned the Chicago street photographer who takes photographs of queer men in Chicago and you mentioned images of girls who go clubbing. How do you negotiate those memories of subculture in your paintings?

GU: I think being in New York has had a really intense impact on me. Coming here in my late 20s and seeing the subcultures, it’s something I’ve never experienced before. I often think if I had spent my teenage years here, what would that be like? I imagine that in my paintings a little bit. I definitely feel like there’s not really a divide for me between high art or low culture. They’re both important to me. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time online looking at images of friends or people who post about their lives on social media or experimental films. All these things stuck with me. I couldn’t really travel that much as a teenager. I mostly stayed at home, and looking at images online was a way of getting to know the rest of the society or the world. There’s a lot of online subcultures that I connect with or look at on Tumblr or Instagram. I feel like that’s a way of knowing about another side of the world that I don’t belong to.

DENG: Being part of the art world, there’s almost this overpowering imperative to blend all affective labor into your own artistic labor, and then that blocks you from being able to connect with a partner. I want to talk about the way you think about this blockage. 

GU: The social labor in the art world is definitely intertwined with my personal life and the act of making artwork. The desire, because it’s so intertwined with work, has to be sectioned off or repressed in order for the art to stay a little bit more autonomous. If I had been too exposed or put the desire out there fully, it would not have as much autonomy. To protect the autonomy of the painting, I have to protect the emotional or social or my desire in order to keep the space safe for me to experiment with the ideas I want.

DENG: Yeah.

GU: I think there’s definitely a blocked or repressed aspect of desire in personal life that I have to manage or control. But that’s just for now. That’s how I have to function.