VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?
ESTRAGON: Yes, let's go.

They do not move.

— Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Xingzi Gu's figures are waiting: adolescents on the cusp of adulthood, two people unsure whether tenderness is approaching or passing, solitary figures sitting in unknown feelings. They seem content to yearn. For Gu, waiting is its own answer; it hardly matters whether Godot ever comes.

Gu builds waiting into the making of each painting. Built from thin layers of acrylics, their paintings can take more than a year to complete. During that time, Gu lives alongside a possibility - resisting a pre-fabricated narrative. They prefer to be on the edge of making a mistake, where a spontaneous stroke can lead to a twist in the story. Shifts in opacity, a character's expression, and the texture of the surface reflect decisions made over time, turning the canvas into what Gu calls a “recording machine.”

In an untitled painting of two figures beside a swing, the ambiguous marks on the left suggest a third body; an apparition, perhaps. Gu did not consciously set out to paint this figure, nor is it entirely accidental. They like to preserve earlier layers of a painting, leaving its forms open to the viewer's imagination. For Gu, who has lived in Nanjing, Auckland, Chicago, and New York, memories shift according to how and when one reminisces about it. The past does not return intact. In memory, it remains open to revision.

The painting records the time Gu spent waiting for it to reveal itself. It asks the viewer to wait in turn: for the two people to start or finish that kiss, for the tulips to bloom or wilt, for the scene to become a story or end. The longer one looks, the clearer it becomes that a resolution may not exist.

Across their series of works, Gu's figures remain similarly unresolved: their bodies mix with the background, the two influencing, absorbing, and producing each other. The ambiguity does not make the figures passive to their surroundings. Instead, it allows the body to grow its own space without defined outlines. Gu's figures do not simply wait in time and space; in waiting, they reshape the world they inhabit.

At the end of Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon agree to leave, then remain where they are. Gu's figures may likewise never reach the futures they await, or, perhaps they will tomorrow. What matters is the world that gathers around their waiting: memories that continue to shift, intimacy that remains imagined, and futures that stay possible precisely because they have not arrived yet.