Qiu Xiaofei – Art Spiel

At first glance, Qiu Xiaofei’s paintings appear weightless, washed in vaporous blues and fractured light. They hover between memory and dream, suspended in a luminous haze. But sustained looking alters the experience. The mist does not dissolve — it thickens. What seemed ethereal becomes anatomical. The viewer descends from the sky into the soil, and then further still into the ruptured systems, broken bodies, and unstable architectures that structure human existence. Beneath the atmospheric softness lies something closer to the bowels of what we call life: exposed nerves of paint, skeletal fragments, windows that stare back like watchful eyes. The work stages, narrates, and exposes modes of excavation.

Qiu Xiaofei: The Theater of Wither and Thrive at Hauser & Wirth
542 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011
February 12 – April 18, 2026. Tue – Sat, 10 am to 6 pm

Qiu Xiaofei presents new oil paintings and works on paper inspired by previously unknown family photographs discovered after his father’s passing. From this intimate source, the exhibition expands into a meditation on memory, loss, and the world’s unstable transformations. Informed by Chinese philosophical traditions and Western poets such as Robert Lowell and Emily Dickinson, Qiu creates vivid, dreamlike scenes in which presence and absence unfold across psychological landscapes. Rooted in family history and his hometown of Harbin, his paintings merge abandoned architecture, nature, and imagination. Recurring spiral motifs evoke non-linear time, while layered imagery bridges personal remembrance with broader historical and emotional experience.