There are artists who paint the world. And then there are those who paint what trembles behind the world. Qiu Xiaofei belongs to this second category. For his first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in New York, entitled "The Theater of Wither and Thrive," he starts with material that is both banal and dizzying: family photographs found after his father's death, undeveloped film, altered by time. These oxidized, sometimes almost ghostly images become the psychological driving force behind a new cycle of paintings.
Qiu Xiaofei is not so much interested in the archive itself, but rather in what it evokes: a meditation on the unstable formation of memory, on how the personal intertwines with history, and on the grand mechanism of life, made up of blossoming and disappearing. The exhibition's title, literally meaning "the theater of decay and blossoming," aptly captures this constant oscillation.
For Qiu Xiaofei, everything is theater, but a mental theater. It's no coincidence that he claims a family heritage linked to the stage: his grandparents directed the Yongfeng Society, a legendary Beijing troupe, where his father was a painter and set designer. The artist's childhood unfolded amidst sets, painted canvases, and manipulated perspectives. Even today, his compositions play on this strange frontality, these deliberately flattened backgrounds that evoke the wings and backdrops of a theater.
At the entrance to the exhibition, a dense red forest greets the visitor. Blood red, lacquer red, incandescent red. Nature becomes almost a backdrop, saturated with signs and silhouettes. Human figures, sometimes recognizable, sometimes transformed into hybrid creatures, seem to float in an unstable space. Landscapes of Harbin, his hometown, intertwine with abandoned architecture and the faces of loved ones. It becomes difficult to distinguish between faithful memory and hallucination.
Because Qiu Xiaofei gradually shifted his painting towards exploring irrational forces: madness, impulses, the uncontrolled eruptions of the unconscious. His canvases don't tell a linear story, but function in layers, through collisions of images. Flowers, fallen petals, outstretched bodies, flickering architectures. Death is never an end, but a passage. The withered flowers already herald renewal.
In four large paintings, the artist explores the cycle of the seasons. Spring, summer, autumn, winter: the motif might seem classic, but here it becomes an existential allegory. Nature and human emotion resonate with each other. The blossoming of forms corresponds to states of mind, the frost or falling leaves to inner turmoil. Qiu Xiaofei never separates landscape from psyche. For him, topography is mental.
Formally, her works are striking for their freedom. Vibrant colors, layering, transparencies, erasures. The artist acknowledges the influence of both Chinese philosophical traditions and Western poets such as Robert Lowell and Emily Dickinson.
This blending is not decorative; it is structural. Qiu Xiaofei conceives of time as a spiral, not a straight line. Past, present, and future overlap, and each painting seems to be a new loop, integrating previous experiences to transform them.
One might see this exhibition as a simple variation on nostalgia, which would be a mistake. For this artist, nostalgia is never gentle: it is permeated by loss, distortion, and tension. The rediscovered photographs are not restored; they are reinvented. The painterly gesture does not seek to repair the past, but to reveal its fissures.
What is truly moving is this way of holding together opposites: growth and decay, brilliance and cruelty, presence and absence. Qiu Xiaofei doesn't take sides. He shows that all life is made up of these antagonistic forces, that individual history is inseparable from larger, almost cosmic movements.
In a world saturated with snapshots, he chooses the slowness of painting to reactivate dormant images. He transforms family fragments into a universal meditation. His theatre has neither curtain nor end: it is this inner space where everything, ceaselessly, fades and flourishes at the same time.
Eve Kaplan
“The Theater of Wither and Thrive” Hauser & Wirth
22nd Street, New York (United States)
From February 12st to April 18 2026
hauserwirth.com
