BONIAN SPACE is pleased to present the solo exhibition “Don’t you remember? You and I karaoked before” by artist Xi LIU, featuring her latest paintings from 2025. The exhibition will run from October 18 to November 16, 2025. Liu’s recent practice explores the dynamic interplay between public spaces and private environments: the boundaries for man-made objects—functioning as tools and affective mediums—between public and private spheres are often shaped by contextual and contingent cues. The artist traces among materials the processes of actively generating or passively disturbing events, and the multilayering of non-linear spacetime, drawing analogies to potential energy exchanges in intersubjective relationships that may lead to collapse, reverie, or explosion. By mapping the spiritual trajectories of materials on canvas, Liu's works continue to reveal the partially independent yet locally intersecting experiential lines between individuals seemingly inhabiting the same physical world, alongside the positive aspects of their ongoing evolution. The exhibition is curated by Yuyang LIN.
“Don’t you remember? You and I karaoked before”
Xi:
I hope this letter finds you well. It was a pleasure meeting you. Yesterday was truly unforgettable. When asked questions, your responses were always astonishingly swift, concise, and resolute—so much so that I began to wonder if, across countless other times and spaces, I had already posed the same questions to you thousands of times, like a pale green 5 cm ball tossed out the window with ever-slightly different curves... The questions were the pretentiously solemn left hand, the responses the duly experienced field.
“Is time linear—” “No.”
I was going to explain. I've asked many people, and they all hesitated before opening their mouths—some more than others—while most fell silent. How I wish I'd discovered sooner the lights in your studio: a ring light made of white circular dots and a DNA lamp spiralling downward. Thankfully, I snapped a picture of it then, and I studied it again at night when I was alone.
Beyond painting, you excel at telling stories. You softly recounted two childhood tales to me and Aria—crucial clues for understanding both you and your art.
Amazing moms always have a way: “The vegetables on your plate are all good friends. If you eat all the friends around the carrot and leave it alone, the carrot will never see its friends again.” And that's how you, as a little kid, managed to finish off the most hated vegetable of all—carrot.
Amazing dads always find a way: You mentioned your dad studied oil painting. When answering calls at home, he'd clasp the receiver in one hand while his other hand kept sketching on paper. Whenever this happened, dad was busy on the line—his sketching alone had the leisure to receive and respond to the signals you sent. So you, the amazing little one, would wait quietly in the corner, eavesdropping on the lingering echoes woven between “half-heard conversations” and “distracted images.”
I liken your paintings to bordellos—every lamp on the canvas is drunk—all spinning dizzyingly—tumbling in place—“whoosh, whoosh, whoosh”—even stars and moons are intoxicated, their glass goblets shattered. They journeyed across vast distances to witness you wielding paint to declare, “Let there be wind.” Thus the world is windy, is a world of revelry, a world of splendor.
You gave your work titles so long they practically explode. Take, for instance, I faced the erupting fireworks; then, light danced upon the riot of sound.; Behind the curtain, clangs clash, clangs collide.; and Like a butterfly, wings whisper, wings flutter. I decided to try reading your titles aloud in a room completely empty (except for me), and the experience surprised me. It felt like using precious, fleeting moments as currency to purchase these syllables—familiar to the eye yet foreign to the ear. This performance reminded me of how you once mentioned that when painting, you always listen to something—not necessarily music, but perhaps a podcast or the like—because those “sentences, or even a single word, serve as reminders to quickly immerse myself in the moment.”
You say your paintings express human relationships by depicting objects and things. I asked if you agreed that “Hell is other people”; in my letter, I apologized for presenting you with a social death question in a meeting of three. Yet again, without hesitation, you replied: “I once believed that.” Everything in your paintings flows; everything around us is now in flux. The air between people, too, is blowing with a new kind of tension.
We talked about Wim Wenders' films. While watching Perfect Days, I kept hitting pause—maybe I got too absorbed and zoned out? There were definitely three laugh-out-loud moments: the first when the feisty Aya gave the protagonist a quick peck on the cheek; The second and third came in quick succession—First, the ex-husband of the izakaya's mom-san, was smoking by the riverbank under flickering night lights, choked and coughed from the smoke—a scene that mirrored the protagonist's event seconds ago. But the funniest moment came after the ex-husband’s question to the protagonist, “When shadows overlap, do they become darker?”—a series of hilarious events follows. You might already know exactly what I'm referring to... or perhaps not at all—“The world is made up of multiple worlds. Some are connected, some are not.”
Thank you Xi. As an idiot, I am closer to this world.
Thankfully, idiots flow too.