Gene Gallery is delighted to announce the solo exhibition “Late Fragment” by artist Gao Xiaoyi, which is from December 7, 2024, to January 18, 2025.

During Gao Xiaoyi’s creations, taking family photo albums as a starting point, she repeatedly gazes upon the images of her parents in their youth and other fragments of past memories, such as the lamps from second-hand shops and worn-out shirts. Gao’s works present a fragmented nostalgic narrative, where the notion of “homeland” is not a specific place or moment in time but rather a layered image interwoven with memories, fantasies, and cinematic scenes. Among the overlapping of different possibilities, the act of returning home is perpetually postponed or deferred.

The interplay of textures and colours resulting from the combination of oil painting and various fabrics bridges Gao’s personal narratives and multisensory perceptions; meanwhile, the wrinkles at different layers seem to fold spatial memory into temporal dimensions. As Bergson remarked, “it has exhausted its possible action, or will only recover an influence by borrowing the vitality of the present perception.” The symbols of memory in Gao’s works tell their own stories, amidst the uncertainty of referents and the distance between identity and resemblance, narrating the interweaving and entanglements of the past, present, and future.