Upon entering the exhibition at Latitude Gallery, you are greeted with a poem as a silent welcome, the cadence of the poem setting both the scene and the pace of the exhibition, titled A Room Rehearses its Own. In this exhibition, the paintings of Xiangjie Rebecca Wu piece together place, memory, and silence, with an impactful portrayal through both presence and absence.
The stanza in the poem that was most poignant for me, the most fitting, was-
This stanza fully immerses me in the work and the memories that Wu presents to us. While the narrative isn’t linear, it is instead told by scenes, perhaps flashbacks, or foggy remembrances, and the paintings carry with them a cinematic feel. Time moves through them, pauses where it needs to, and lets the viewer feel the pull, the sensation of time’s duration.
Wu’s images stem from memories- a collection of images gathered, recalled, and recreated. She paints the scene she remembers, the images she feels, and allows the viewer to feel it as well. When I walked through these pieces, I felt as if I stepped into a Yasujiro Ozu or an Andrei Tarkovsky film. Ozu came first to mind because many of his films deal with the home and everyday life, and the poignant nature of time and life inevitably moving forward. Many of his films had scenes where the small details mattered, the glint of a plate, the kitchen cabinet, or the steam insinuated from a now quiet tea kettle. Both Ozu and Wu expertly make us, as viewers, feel the weight and pull of time, where the present tells of the past as it continues forward simultaneously. Most of the scenes in the paintings, being devoid of figures, immerse us further as active participants within the work. Similar to the work titled Grey Cardigans, pictured below, of cardigans waiting to be worn, the absence is unmistakable, but the potential of something happening is inevitably there. The constant feeling of remembering a similar scene or scenario carries throughout the exhibition.
The entire installation of the show mirrors that of a home, a place of familiarity. Each painting is hung with great care, the placement intentional. Paintings of shoes are hung close to the floor beside a chair, as if inviting us to sit by it, to enter the piece itself by immersing ourselves in the motion and function of it, as if to possibly remove our own shoes and place them next to the others. Other pieces are hung at proper heights, to be felt: a drawer filled with marbles, where we can turn the corner and feel as if we were looking down into it, teapots on kitchen shelves hung just high enough for us to feel the height, being just above eye level, and the weight of the cast shadow Wu places upon them. The pieces and their placement become the props of the scene, the pieces of the memory that Wu intwines together to create a recollection- a scenario in which a memory originates.
