Fairs

Frieze London
​2025
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Gu Xingzi
A Half-Dream

Focus sector
Booth F35

Dates_ October 15–19, 2025
Venue_ The Regent’s Park

Frieze Viewing Room, London Edition
Online, October 8–23, 2025
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Installation Views / Works / Press Release

Gallery Vacancy is pleased to present A Half-Dream, a solo project by Chinese-born, Brooklyn-based artist Gu Xingzi (they/them) for the Focus section at Frieze London 2025. Gu unveils a new body of work that explores the nuanced condition of foreignness through meditative and evocative imagery. Using an ethereal color palette, the artist develops a visual language that transcends reality, transforming skillfully washed linen canvases into silhouettes of wistful melancholy and dreamlike decadence. Intimate yet distant, the atmospheric portraitures—reimagined as androgynous figures—examine the fluidity of queerness through shimmering contours interwoven with suspended gestures and postures that linger in a state of youthful innocence.

In Pinwheel (2025), two figures share a bicycle beneath a canopy of trees, their forms gently overlapping like layers of memory. Bathed in rose and green haze, the scene recalls the lingering warmth of childhood—closeness, stillness, and quiet care. Gu paints with a filmic delicacy, allowing the past to surface not as nostalgia but as a muted recollection, where time seems to breathe through color. The small puppy nestled in the basket becomes the keeper of this remembered affection.

Rendered in Gu’s signature misty palette, Dropping Needle (2025) captures a moment of hushed intimacy within a domestic interior. A woman sits in the foreground threading a needle, while another figure lingers in the background, cradling a vase of flowers—both suspended in nuanced gradients of light and tone. The composition unfolds through layered depth, creating a still interval between them. Drawing from cinematic sensibility, Gu transforms ordinary gestures into emotional reverberations, where time slows and quietude itself becomes a vessel of emotion.

Two girls linger by a fence suffused with pink light, unfolding the quiet emotion of Moonlight Zoo (2025) as if pausing between breath and thought at the edge of a crossroads. By their side, two young sheep drift in mild confusion, mirroring the ache between companionship and departure. Dressed in contrasting hues, the girls seem bound by an invisible thread of youth—a fleeting moment when individuality and togetherness blur. Through this soft ambiguity, the painting evokes the dilemmas of growing up—suspended between solitude, connection, and the longing to belong.

Permeated by an elusive sense of cultural belonging, Gu imbues hollow flesh with emotions of yearning and desire, allowing a fragile sense of connection to drift across physical boundaries and earthly ties. Each painting settles at a surreal edge within the booth, where walls suffused with the diffused warmth of dawn tones turn displacement into a shared human experience—a tactile encounter in the abstract, where touch is conveyed through intangible forms and vaporous color.

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