In artist Xingzi Gu’s dreamy paintings, people appear as if through a fogged-up window. They lounge on a hammock, ride two to a bike, light one another’s cigarettes, their heads butted closely together. In one painting, someone sits at a sewing machine while a figure holding a plant lingers in the doorway. Colours merge and seep into one another, like a dream.

“The people that appear are mostly from films and photographs I see online or random photographs from friends. Mostly, it is love at first sight; when I see someone I like, it is a natural impulse to want to paint that person,” Xingzi tells me in a café over piping hot turmeric teas. “It is about the visual appeal at first and there is some kind of hidden message behind it later,” they continue. They are painting a world they want to exist in.

Originally from Nanjing, China, and now working out of a studio in Dumbo in Brooklyn, where the terrain can be hostile and the people sometimes brusque, they carve out a universe where tender touches linger and the landscape is soft. They share, “I want to be able to find my own ways of working with different techniques – from the Eastern and Western. It is definitely helpful to look at the power of nature and flowers, these kinds of classic ideas. But if I’m painting an adolescent on a bike, this is a very modern subject and I need to find my own ways of how to paint those things.” What results is a stirring of emotions, as if youth is slipping through your fingers.

Photography courtesy of Xingzi Gu.

@__sing.zi