Untitled, 2024
Alice Gong Xiaowen (Canadian, b. Beijing) is an interdisciplinary artist whose thoughts linger on the conceptual connotations of matter, once repositioned and interpreted as material culture.
They are drawn to processes of indexing as meditations on anticipating loss, allowing action to become a hand in mitigating that which is becoming distant, disintegrating, slipping; yet made anew. Substrates of recording and capture, inevitably distorted and disembodied, become the subjects of inquiry in of themselves.
Translation helps lay to witness, stills from an exhaustive effort to hold onto that which is constantly in a stage of atrophy—to make relics from remnants that are no longer exercised via a reconjuring of memory through sound, texture, and impression.
While mourning often fixates on a specific object of loss, her research moves in cylindrical orbits around a void, marking absence by preserving the residual layers of labor. Accumulative traces marking movement, maintenance, and rest become overlapping frames of capture; flattened archives of duration and effort. The indecipherable, buried, or missing become moving targets of psychological and material inquiry that reemerge in physical remnants and sites that present like evidentiary residue.
Like an asymptote; a line that continually approaches a given curve but does not meet it at any finite distance, to negotiate with memory is to constantly reimagine a past. When does sensory perception end and how do impressions remain, propagate, and mutate within selective mental recollection?
Gong Xiaowen approaches composition through materiality, the crafted and ready-made become formalized as a collage of referents that intentionally defamiliarize—allude. Where experimentation moves from concrete to abstract vis-à-vis a play on sensory signifiers, a means to deconstruct perceptual assumptions regarding the representation of visual or auditory forms.
They are drawn to processes of indexing as meditations on anticipating loss, allowing action to become a hand in mitigating that which is becoming distant, disintegrating, slipping; yet made anew. Substrates of recording and capture, inevitably distorted and disembodied, become the subjects of inquiry in of themselves.
Translation helps lay to witness, stills from an exhaustive effort to hold onto that which is constantly in a stage of atrophy—to make relics from remnants that are no longer exercised via a reconjuring of memory through sound, texture, and impression.
While mourning often fixates on a specific object of loss, her research moves in cylindrical orbits around a void, marking absence by preserving the residual layers of labor. Accumulative traces marking movement, maintenance, and rest become overlapping frames of capture; flattened archives of duration and effort. The indecipherable, buried, or missing become moving targets of psychological and material inquiry that reemerge in physical remnants and sites that present like evidentiary residue.
Like an asymptote; a line that continually approaches a given curve but does not meet it at any finite distance, to negotiate with memory is to constantly reimagine a past. When does sensory perception end and how do impressions remain, propagate, and mutate within selective mental recollection?
Gong Xiaowen approaches composition through materiality, the crafted and ready-made become formalized as a collage of referents that intentionally defamiliarize—allude. Where experimentation moves from concrete to abstract vis-à-vis a play on sensory signifiers, a means to deconstruct perceptual assumptions regarding the representation of visual or auditory forms.