Alice Gong Xiaowen is an interdisciplinary artist and a knowledge seeker. Her thoughts linger on the conceptual connotations of matter, once repositioned and interpreted as material culture. In Xiaowen’s practice, material translations of matter and haptic memories imagine the collapse and reconfiguration of object-hood. She is drawn to processes of indexing as meditations on anticipating loss as it allows action to have a hand in mitigating that which is continuously becoming distant, disintegrating, slipping, yet anew. Translation helps lay to witness, stills from an exhaustive effort to hold onto that which is constantly in a stage of atrophy—to make relics from fugitive personal and cultural memory remnants that are no longer exercised via a reconjuring of memory through sound, texture, and impression.
In search of artistic gestures against closure, an excerpt from their current research abstract proposes an expanded avenue of material experimentation such that, "The perception of sound translated into meaning as thought or imagination is generated by conscious methods of participation—listening. Sound as elemental gestures or mentally mediated reoccurrences are explicably indexical sensory experiences of materiality that elude the visual constrictions of signification vis-à-vis semiotic representation or interpellation. How that acoustic indexicality is initially perceived or sensed and thus further conceived or interpreted into meaning is a rich moment of comparison for examining how audibility is articulated across traditions of musical thought both ancient and post modern".
Alice Gong Xiaowen (Canadian, b. Beijing) lives and works in New York. Selected solo and two person presentations include Lower Cavity/CHAMBER (Holyoke, MA) and House of Seiko (San Francisco, CA). Recent group exhibitions include Franz Kaka (Toronto, CA), Silke Lindner (New York, NY) and Duplex (New York, NY). She holds a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Xiaowen will present new work at NADA New York with Franz Kaka (Toronto, CA) later this year.