Asia Art Center (Taipei) is pleased to present XIAO Qi-Heng: Summer Days, on view from April 19 to June 8, 2025. This marks the emerging artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery. Xiao's paintings have long functioned as a form of visual diary, documenting distinct emotional and physical states at various life stages, including the sense of confinement during military service (Keep, 2020) and the restricted mobility during the pandemic (Best Place Map, 2023). Summer Days represents a new chapter, recording Xiao's five-day trip to Tokyo in the summer of 2023, his first international journey after the pandemic——an experience so novel that even the airport boarding stairs felt refreshingly unfamiliar.
Previously shortlisted as a finalist for the 22nd Taishin Arts Award, one of the most prestigious contemporary art prizes in Taiwan, for his exhibition Summer Days, Xiao continues his exploration of landscape retrieval and personalized landmarks, assigning each painting in this exhibition a specific set of map coordinates. These coordinates allow viewers to trace the artist's journey, while his short, densely layered brushstrokes vividly capture the intense heat and the sheer joy of traveling through Tokyo in summer. Surrounding the primary paintings are clusters of smaller 'satellite' works, scattered and grouped in a manner that echoes the way one retrieves a significant memory. Just as the hippocampus first recalls a few striking scenes before reconstructing the surrounding environment and events, these fragmentary images gradually coalesce into a fuller narrative of the journey. Xiao is adept at reimagining the people, places, and events he encounters as Easter eggs in a video game or anime adventure. In his interpretation, even the most iconic landmarks are transformed into deeply private, idiosyncratic experiences.
More than 50 oil paintings and drawings are featured in the exhibition, including numerous oil on paper works. These lighter, sketch-like pieces reflect Xiao's response to the posters, flyers, and signage he encountered throughout Tokyo. To the artist, these seemingly ordinary foreign scenes and objects appear strikingly vivid.
Furthermore, the exhibition layout itself follows the arc of the five-day travelogue, creating a linear narrative path through each site visited, from departure to return. Much like flipping through a photo album of a trip can instantly revive the bodily sensations of that journey, walking this path reawakens the physical memories of Xiao's summer adventure.
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Born in 1991 in Changhua, Taiwan, Xiao Qi-Heng earned his MFA from the Department of Arts and Design at National Tsing Hua University. He currently lives and works in Kaohsiung. He is the recipient of the 3rd Grand View Emerging Artists Award (2016) and an Honorable Mention at the 2018 Kaohsiung Awards. He was also selected for the 2019 Taipei Art Awards and was a finalist for the 22nd Taishin Arts Award in 2023. His work has been exhibited at the Sato Museum of Art (Japan), Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, and various alternative art spaces. Working primarily in painting, Xiao draws inspiration from daily experiences to fuel his creative energy. His depictions of external scenes and spaces are richly infused with personal impressions and emotions, blending reality and imagination.