The solo exhibition of the artist Danqing Xu has recently opened at the ARCH GALLERY. This is the artist's first solo exhibition after becoming a mother, exploring the profound connection between personal experiences, life growth, and artistic creation from a new perspective. The title of the exhibition, "May It Shine," is inspired by the babbling of the artist's young daughter when she tried to pronounce the word "moon." The moon, an age-old symbol of poetry, love, and wishes, is endowed with an intimate and profound emotional meaning in this exhibition. In her daughter's indistinct syllables, the artist has captured the child's first call to the world and also found a unique expression of her new identity as a mother.
In a corner of the vast sea of stars, love captures a child's first call to the moon and touches the pure yet profound emotional bonds within intimate relationships. With the convergence of tides and the cosmos, every moment of companionship is a luminous vision. Like a gentle moonlight, it illuminates the tender corners of a mother's heart and reflects a child's boundless love and hope for the world. Dreams woven in the night are hymns to love and romance, flowing like a moonlit feast where life softly hums.
"The only way out of a dream... is the moonlit path from the earth... Along this silvery moonlit path, he often sat with her by the gravel-heavy moonlight on the seabed off the coast of Pater Noster."
— Harry Martinson, Moonlight
"I stayed awake with her through the night and witnessed many forms of the night."
New vitality grows from past experiences, unfolding as a personal visual exploration of life, family, and the love and creation that intertwine them. "All our knowledge begins with intuition, the most fundamental form of knowledge" (Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology). In Xu Danqing’s new works, we see this intuitive expression, uplifted by emotion. Simultaneously, the artist's working and living patterns have undergone transformative changes, deeply influencing her artistic practice. "Motherhood is one of the most complex and contradictory domains of female experience" (Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born). Her new works embody this complexity and contradiction. With fresh experiences of gestation and nurturing, her paintings surge with intense love and strength, offering a profound response to maternal experience and a redefinition of her own creativity.
Xu Danqing’s approach to painting does not pursue absolute beauty or grandeur but maintains a restrained rationality and a delightful skepticism toward abstract art. She continuously reexamines the subtle distinctions of color, shape, and light, presenting a process of decision-making and order-building. Shifting lines and hazy blocks of color are always brimming with emotion, as colors move, deviate, and glide, remaining in perpetual motion. Layer upon layer is tinted, and images begin to flow. The infinite vitality of childhood inspires greater bravery and improvisation in her new works, as she finds her own path between preservation and transformation. The works reveal a new soft strength—like ripples under moonlight—and give rise to new harmonies.
Extremely minute musical motifs construct life-like structures, accumulating, proliferating, expanding, and gestating. The artist employs dynamic brushstrokes to weave sensory textures, pursuing and reflecting on structure through a suspended inquiry into abstract painting—a reflection imbued with a sense of time and fluidity. With genuine life experiences as the initial impetus, the nurturing of new life as the prelude to development, and a consistent encoding and translation of musicality, the works now present a more condensed life force. Trustingly, the artist allows rhythmic structures within the paintings to ferment into flow, acknowledging the inner bodily schema that embraces occurrence. Blending fresh emotions and biological instincts with abstract symbolic language, she narrates her own experiences, interpreting and contemplating her role in an interplay of dreams and ambiguity, tenderness and strength, with a subtle and implicit power. The paintings embody a gentle, steady vitality, akin to a soft lullaby. The details of time spent with a newborn become variations of musical notes, allowing imagery of the moon, new life, and creation to spontaneously intertwine within profound, ineffable inner experiences. On every tranquil night, the moonlight pours down.
