No one can push open the door in their childhood.
This instinctive thought came to me upon entering A Room Rehearses Its Own, Xiangjie Rebecca Wu’s solo exhibition at LATITUDE Gallery. As I walked up the stairs into the gallery, what first drew my attention was a painting on the left wall: an open palm, turned upward, holding several marbles. They rest quietly in the hand, as if being offered toward me. The marbles feel familiar, drawn from childhood memory, but within the image, they carry a slight haze, something both known and estranged, as though filtered through recollection itself.
This sensation seems to echo the lines from Louise Glück’s This Is the House, quoted on the opposite wall:
I remember my childhood as a long wish to be elsewhere.
This is the house;
this must be the childhood I had in mind.
Not to reenter, not to recover. No one can truly return to childhood, just as no one can truly push open that door.
