Xinyi Cheng: Sing to It

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Xinyi Cheng: Sing to It, the next exhibition in his gallery at 1062 North Orange Grove in Los Angeles. The exhibition includes twelve new paintings and is the artist’s first one-person show in Los Angeles.

Cheng’s paintings begin with what the artist refers to as a “situation” – a scene from her memory or imagination, in which people, animals, and/or objects appear in peculiar, intimate moments. She draws upon her personal life and experiences for inspiration, whether it’s models she asks to sit for her, objects in her home, or a painting encountered in a museum. Ambiguous gazes, unexpected colors, and turbulent environments in her paintings convey wide-ranging emotions, including curiosity, alienation, peacefulness, or unease. According to the artist, her subjects share a state of estrangement. “For me, displacement means creative freedom,” she has said, “like being able to be somewhere else, to be able to transcend something.”

The paintings in the exhibition present diverse subjects and perspectives. In Lily’s Mobile, Cheng’s cat is seen inquisitively looking up at her daughter’s mobile. In Oneself, a man turns away from his reflection in a window. Two paintings, each titled Young man with gloves, recast the subject of Otto Dix’s 1932 painting Nude Girl with Gloves, replacing the protagonist with a young man.

The exhibition’s title is taken from a short story by Amy Hempel of the same name. Hempel’s story, as recited by Cheng, reads,

No metaphors, nothing is like anything else.
Make your hands a hammock for me,
My arms the trees,
When the danger approaches, sing to it.

Xinyi Cheng (b. 1989, Wuhan, China) lives and works in Paris. Her work has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, and Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, and included in numerous group exhibitions, among them, the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Renaissance Society, Chicago; the SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation, Seoul; the 13th Shanghai Biennale; and the Bourse de Commerce, Paris.