Exhibition

Alice Gong Xiaowen
Sustain

Duration_ May 30–July 5, 2025
Opening_ Friday, May 30, 4–7 PM
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Press Release

Gallery Vacancy is pleased to present Sustain, a solo exhibition by Alice Gong Xiaowen, on view from May 30 to July 5, 2025. 

The exhibition features a site-specific installation of acoustically sounding guqin strings, a constellation of cast glass sculptures, and a scene of translucent graphite prints. Writer R. Morris Levine details the exhibition’s central sound work, in this excerpt from his essay on the artist:

“Alice Gong Xiaowen builds three walls in a vacant gallery; hangs seven nylon-wrapped metal guqin strings, each of a different gauge; winds the strings to their proper tensions; and attaches the strings to solenoid magnets, tethered to a nearby computer. At first glance, Sustain (2025) appears to be a pristine minimalist installation. Michael Asher had torn through a gallery’s white-walls to expose the operations behind; Xiaowen multiples the gallery’s walls to make its void unmistakable. At first listen, Sustain seems like a well-tempered minimalist instrument. John Cage had dreamed of an art without work; Xiaowen’s strings play themselves, no bow or hand required. Ellen Fullman had imagined a Long String Instrument that would stretch across a room; Xiaowen’s instrument is a room.1 Pierre Schaeffer had sought to ‘forget meaning and isolate the in-itselfness of the sound’—to hear not the sound’s source but ‘its texture, matter, color’; Xiaowen’s strings disappear as they vibrate, so the space swells with acousmatic tones of no apparent origin.2 But minimalist is a misnomer, not in spite of Sustain’s ‘texture, matter, color,’ but because of it. As Sustain performs Xiaowen’s score, its strings slacken from the oscillations, and the metal’s subtle recomposition introduces variations into the composition. These variations in the string’s sonic texture in turn record the day’s history—and, beneath it, a history of days bygone. Those strings were ‘the peripheral sound of my childhood environment,’ Xiaowen explains.3 She heard them so often that she stopped hearing them. And yet, the guqin’s sound must have reverberated in some ‘subconscious place,’ she notes. Like the crumbs of a madeleine reconjured in Proust ‘a long-distant past’ from which ‘nothing [seemed to] subsist,’ so did the timbre of the guqin, upon a chance listen, resurface in Xiaowen an absence she hadn’t known was so closely-held.4 Under this absence returned, however, is another absence sustained. ‘The guqin revealed itself to be the sound of ideological change,’ Xiaowen observes.5 At the outset of China’s Cultural Revolution, the guqin was dismissed as a vestige of the country’s reactionary past. The instruments were destroyed, the compositions were burned, and the performers were arrested. Historian Tsan-Huang Tsai explains, ‘[the zither’s] construction was commonly believed to be insufficiently “scientific,” and it was considered unable to meet the basic requirement of serving the general public due to its low volume…. Furthermore, according to the Cultural Revolution ideologies, far too much of the ancient repertoire contained “unhealthy” content.’6 In 1973, a Reform Committee was established to adapt the guqin to the revolutionary present. The Committee assembled a modern repertoire—classical opuses, such as ‘A Dialogue between the Fisherman and the Woodcutter (渔樵问答)’and ‘Returning Home (归去来辞),’ were replaced with ‘Missing Our Savior in the Sweet and the Bitter Times (忆苦思甜念救星)’ and ‘The Energetic Ironworkers (打铁工人有力量)’—and the quiet silk strings were swapped for nylon-wrapped metal.7 As the guqin was renovated from a relic of the aristocratic past to a symbol of the radiant proletarian future, so was its sound transformed. Though metal strings did increase the guqin’s volume, they could not replicate the silk strings’ resplendent overtones.8 By the 1990s, silk-strung guqin had become rare. Rarer still are they today. Sustain is at once a score for a private history’s return and for a national history’s repression. In its absent overtones lurk the presence of another absence.”

About the artist’s sculptures and prints, R. Morris Levine continues: 

“At first look, This Hour Was Once Whole (2025) seems to be a map of some abandoned landscape. Xiaowen finds a photo album in a thrift store; dusts the album off; peels a page apart in search of the images; and discovers only the empty sleeves where they once stood. She unbinds another page, another, another, each revealing more nothing, and rubs the pages with graphite paper to trace the nothing’s surface. The resulting print is the chronicle of an hour that no longer is and of a family that was never her own. All that remains of this once whole hour are holes where the album has torn and fibers where the paper has worn, yellowed silhouettes where the photographs once stood and discs of glue that once fastened them in place. Xiaowen records the remnants of this irredeemable hour in devotional, even forensic, detail, like a priestess decoding a sacred hieroglyph or a detective sleuthing for evidence. Whereas Sustain indexes Xiaowen’s childhood history and a national history disappeared, This Hour Was Once Whole doubles Xiaowen’s indexical method: the graphite indexes her hand, tracing the indices of the hands that once held this album. There are other pages. Xiaowen folds them; pours plaster and silica around the folded pages; places glass atop the mold; fires the glass in the kiln to make their nothing thicker; and out emerge Blanks (2025). They aren’t exactly stained glass; they tell no biblical history and will adorn no cathedral. Rather, they are glass stained with memories no book shall know. Stains of another’s absence that Xiaowen ensures will remain present until they, too, erode into anonymous remains on a thrift-store shelf.”
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Together in Sustain, Gong attempts to preserve the ephemeral and make present the absent—those people, memories, pasts, and futures we didn’t even know we had lost. If every photographic still is an image of death, the unbound album with its age-worn pages splayed open, together begin to form a reel. Translucent and overlaid along the gallery’s windows, the graphite prints frame a historic cityscape of Shanghai’s low-rise buildings; their patinated façades concealed, awaiting demolition. If the view beyond speaks to cycles of erasure and renewal, Gong’s imprints labor in quiet counterpoint—anticipatory but lamentive—to the last vestiges of what still yet remains. 

1 Ellen Fullman, “The History of the Long String Instrument,” Echo: The Images of Sound (Eindhoven: Het Apollohuis, 1987), 30–33.
2 Pierre Schaeffer, In Search of Concrete Music, trans. Christine North and John Dack (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 13. Originally published as À la recherche d’une musique concrète (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1948). 
3 Alice Gong Xiaowen, personal correspondence with the author, May 14, 2025. 
4 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Random House, 1992), 50–51. Originally published as À la recherche du temps perdu: Du côté de chez Swann (Paris: Grasset, 1913). 
5 Alice Gong Xiaowen, personal correspondence with the author, May 14, 2025.
6 Tsan-Huang Tsai, “From Confucianist Meditative Tool to Maoist Revolutionary Weapon: The Seven-Stringed Zither (Qin) in the Cultural Revolution,” Listening to China's Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities, ed. Laikwan Pang (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 45. 
7 Ibid.
8 John Thompson, “Silk Strings,” The Guqin Silk String Zither (2003):  https://silkqin.com/01mywk/siteor.htm.

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