Loss, nostalgia and grief are among the most powerful inspirations for artistic creation, catalyzing work that arises from real urgency. All of us, artists or not, yearn to process the apparently irrational trajectory of human existence in its fragility and unpredictability while also reaching toward transcendence and finding threads that connect the individual psyche with something collective, the ancestral and cosmic. Chinese artist Qiu Xiaofei’s densely psychologically charged, symbolically layered and vibrant paintings inhabit this threshold between individual psychological drama and shared emotional conditions.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the luminous works the painter presents in his debut at Hauser & Wirth in New York emerged from darkness. Mourning his father’s passing and motivated to recall, retrace and finally understand his life, he encountered a series of family photographs among his father’s belongings that became the psychological and creative catalyst for this new body of work.
In “The Theater of Wither and Thrive,” Qiu captures the drama inherent in the life cycle of all earthly and time-bound existence, of flesh and soul alike. His powerful canvases expand across the gallery’s vast fifth-floor space with an irruptive, hallucinatory intensity that feels almost fantastical, as if surfacing spontaneously from the subconscious. Yet, as he explains while guiding us through the exhibition, his work does not originate purely from a dream space or an abstract mental realm. It begins with the observation of what is seen, lived and experienced. “I always carry notebooks with me. We come to know who we are through recording moments,” he explains. “They become companions. They are constant records of perception, memory and emotion, which later feed into the larger works.”
Qiu’s paintings unfold through a synthesis of observation, recollection and imaginative reconstruction. When he begins a work, he returns to his recorded memories, observations and images, weaving them together. His canvases are marked by dense layering: painterly passages, figures and symbolic elements that reflect stratified temporal and spatial moments, all condensed and collapsed onto a single surface where color blends fluidly.
Much of the imagery is rooted in the geography of Harbin, his hometown. Abandoned architecture and stark natural landscapes appear as fragmentary, almost theatrical backdrops, evoking a poetics of remnants. At the same time, they register the psychological and spiritual dimensions of collective trauma, the enduring marks left by the accelerated modernization China underwent as Qiu was growing up. That drastic transformation often entailed the erasure of heritage, memory and ancestral traditions, and with it, the uprooting of a sense of place, being and time. “Many of these buildings no longer exist. They were demolished overnight during redevelopment projects,” Qiu says. “In the paintings, they reappear almost like ghost structures—architectural memories suspended in time.”
Alongside these layered symbolic presences emerging from the fluid terrain of subconscious memory, larger “master” figures loom over smaller ones, creating charged shifts in scale. The effect can evoke surveillance or existential pressure, the condition of living in dense contemporary cities, particularly resonant in China but equally legible in the U.S. and elsewhere. The works subtly reflect how individuals situate themselves within vast, opaque and often overwhelming systems.
The vertical composition that characterizes these canvases can be read not only spatially but temporally. In traditional Chinese thought, time is not strictly linear in the Western sense; it unfolds more cyclically, layered rather than progressing from left to right. The verticality of the image can therefore suggest an accumulation of time, stacked moments and coexisting realities rather than a single linear narrative progression. Central to his practice, he says, is the motif of the spiral. “All my paintings point to the same origin, forming an upward-moving spiral. Every new attempt to include experiences of greater complexity incorporates past solutions.” In this sense, Qiu’s paintings defy linear narratives, holding remnants of the past and fragments of memory drawn by a centripetal force that condenses them on the surface.
Trained in traditional painting from a young age, Qiu absorbed its visual language as a foundation. Later he majored in oil painting, studying the history of Western art. His work reflects a convergence of these approaches: the structural logic of Chinese composition intertwined with the material and chromatic vocabulary of Western oil painting.
The variation in scale, for instance, draws directly from traditional Chinese pictorial logic. “Historically, painters would adopt an elevated vantage point to survey the world from above,” he explains, noting that scale was symbolic rather than merely optical: larger figures signified importance while smaller ones receded. The hierarchy of size thus reflects a worldview, a positioning of the human within nature and within a broader relational order. His manipulation of scale is contemporary in its psychological undertone yet rooted in longstanding Chinese cosmology, in a vision of time and space in which human beings exist within an intricate web of interdependence in a fluid, wave-like cosmic system.
This compositional structure is part of what makes his canvases so compelling. They operate as open-ended narratives that invite viewers to move through multiple landscapes, narrative episodes and symbolic details. “The audience can read it almost sequentially, as if passing through multiple storytelling points within the same image,” he says. The paintings demand prolonged contemplation, resisting the accelerated consumption of today’s visual culture.
His works on paper, displayed in a separate room, feel even more intuitive. Gouache resists full control; its fluidity becomes a source of vitality. Many drawings unfold as continuous lines, recalling Paul Klee’s idea of “taking a line for a walk,” a line that traces a story or a memory as it emerges through the act of making.
This approach connects to the traditional Chinese technique of 白描 (báimiáo), often translated as “white drawing,” a method emphasizing refined, uncolored line. The focus rests on contour alone, capturing the spirit of form without reliance on shading or realism. For Qiu, working with line is also working with time. “Each line traces a temporal gesture,” he explains. “It’s like taking a line for a walk—but those accumulated lines later migrate onto the canvas.”
Even when, in his oil on canvas works, the surface appears painterly and color-driven, an underlying drawing often structures the composition. Yet freshness and immediacy remain central. “Painting allows for an impulsive, temporary capture of feeling in the moment,” he says. There is clearly an undercurrent of sorrow running through the work, offering a visual meditation on the passing of time and the transitional, ephemeral nature of all things. And yet the colors seem to contradict that. They are vivid, energetic, almost electric, reading less as expressions of grief and more as lively currents of energy moving through the figures and landscapes.
“Much of what you see in this exhibition is, in one way or another, about passing—about disappearance, transition, loss,” Qiu confirms. While pointing to one of the works, he references Angelus Novus, a work by Paul Klee that Walter Benjamin famously carried with him until his death by suicide while fleeing the Nazis. The image became symbolically bound up with catastrophe, history and personal fate. In his 1940 text, Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin famously interprets Klee’s angel as the “angel of history.” As he wrote of the angel facing the past, what we call progress appears as a single, accumulating catastrophe. The angel would like to “make whole what has been smashed.” But a storm—called progress—blows him irresistibly into the future.
That layer of reference deepens the sense that these paintings are meditations on rupture and historical trauma as much as on private grief. “The color doesn’t negate this pain, if anything, it transforms it,” Qiu says, noting how the brightness feels less like denial and more like a charge, a way of animating what has been lost. In the red-toned canvas, The Theater of Wither and Thrive, that gives the show its title, Qiu pictures a fragile, reclining nude figure amid layered green line-drawn plants, fragmented houses and floating portrait panels. The figure appears as a ghostly presence suspended in a dreamlike landscape that blends memory, architecture and nature. The image emerges from a deeply personal memory—watching his father in the final months and years of his life. “I witnessed how the body gradually weakened, how it seemed almost ready to let go, as if the vessel itself were dissolving,” he recalls. Yet even as the physical form deteriorated, the conversations and connection remained profound, persisting beyond his departure from this terrestrial existence. “The mind, the spirit, the presence—those endured.”
But Qiu’s powerful canvases do not simply dwell in absence and loss. Instead, they stage a kind of luminous remembrance, where grief becomes energy, and memory continues to pulse through the surface of the painting with the souls and spiritual lives of those who remain with us. Grief here is not contained within the individual body; it expands outward, touching collective trauma and even the cosmic order. A single reclining figure opens into a universal meditation on the meaning of human existence itself. Echoing Gaston Bachelard’s notion of “intimate immensity,” interior space, memory, reverie and grief suddenly expand as human fragility is positioned within a vast relational order.
Toward the end of our visit, Qiu acknowledges that his paintings are spiritual, not in a doctrinal sense but in that they express the internal world. They arise from specific feelings, memories and emotions, becoming an embodied transpersonal awareness of our condition as humans in the “time being” of our existence in this body and on this earth. “Human beings are imperfect; we live with fear and anxiety. Yet it is precisely through that imperfection that something spiritual emerges,” he says. “Art does not cure anxiety or make us perfect, but painting becomes a way to visualize those intangible, interior dimensions—to give form to what is otherwise invisible.”
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