Xintong Gao: What Refuses to Settle

LATITUDE Gallery is pleased to present What Refuses to Settle, Xintong Gao’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from September 9 through October 17, 2026. Bringing together a new body of paintings, the exhibition extends Gao’s ongoing investigation of movement, perception, and the unstable threshold between abstraction and recognizable form.

Across the exhibition, forms gather without fully resolving. Sweeping passages of paint fold into one another; translucent gestures interrupt denser fields; suggestions of bodies, landscapes, water, and atmosphere emerge only to disappear again. Rather than leading the eye toward a fixed image, Gao allows recognition to remain provisional, suspending the paintings between formation and dissolution.

Movement has long occupied an unsettled position within the history of modern painting. Based in Bologna, Italy, Gao received both his BFA and MFA in painting from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara, developing his practice in close proximity to the histories of Italian modernism. While the Futurists fractured the static image to give visual form to speed, simultaneity, and modern life, Gao turns movement toward a different end. Speed is neither a celebration of progress nor simply a record of physical gesture; it becomes a means of destabilizing perception, allowing forms to overlap, dissolve, and return before the eye can fully possess them.

Alongside these histories, Gao engages with Chinese aesthetic and philosophical traditions. In classical Chinese thought and painting, qi (气)—breath or vital energy—is made perceptible through relationships among gesture, rhythm, form, and empty space. The related concept of qiyun (气韵), or rhythmic vitality, understands an image as something animated from within. Gao brings these ideas into conversation with the scale, material density, and gestural vocabulary of contemporary abstraction, without resolving them into a simple meeting of East and West.

His paintings instead develop through layering, interruption, erasure, and return. Gestures that appear spontaneous coexist with carefully constructed passages; transparency gives way to compressed, turbulent fields. Intention and contingency remain in continuous negotiation. Painting becomes less a means of arriving at an image than a process through which an image is allowed to appear, shift, and resist completion.

This tension is particularly visible in Gao’s ongoing The Wave Collection. Wave-like structures operate less as representations of water than as temporary forms assumed by movement. They swell, fold, collapse, and reassemble across the linen, establishing rhythms that continually disrupt themselves. Elsewhere, forms approach fragments of figures, landscapes, or atmospheric spaces before slipping again toward abstraction.

What Refuses to Settle follows Gao’s first solo exhibition with LATITUDE, Whispers of Velocity (2024). Where that exhibition considered velocity through the tension between movement and stillness, the present exhibition turns toward what remains unresolved within movement itself. For Gao, this refusal is not a failure of resolution but a generative condition: forms remain open to transformation, and meaning accumulates without becoming fixed.

In What Refuses to Settle, instability becomes a condition of seeing. Intention encounters surrender, gesture approaches image, and the visible brushes against what cannot quite be named. What refuses to settle is therefore not only the painted form, but the act of seeing itself.