Caochangdi | Qiu Xiaofei
A green metal door pasted with cartoon stickers, the chemical blue of mosquito lights, a tower of building blocks never owned but surely glimpsed once in a catalog or in a friend's attic toy chest: Qiu Xiaofei's show is a study of psychology and recall.

The thirty-year-old Beijing-based artist creates works that draw on themes of personal and cultural memories, which are often confused with or perverted by the dreams of the present. The large installations create sensations of familiarity and faint recollection without giving any clear resolution. The span of an ice rink is incised with bloody skate paths, a nod to playground violence. The blue room houses a great incense coil as a relic of long summers spent watching the scent burn because there was nothing better to do. Next door, a headless plaster figure stands in a white cube gallery after having blacked out all the canvases with paint.

The bright, multicolored building blocks of Ruins I are painted with folk motifs. Its Jungian shadow, Ruins II, is painted with clocks and archetypal child figures and looks like it could topple with a push, a reminder that memory is not so much crystallized as it is moldy, musty and full of weeds.

The exhibition's best summation lies in the three painted doors of Home. Recognizable enough to give an idea of where they might lead, these doors open to nowhere and exist side by side because memory flattens our perception of time. It is as Proust remarked about his evocative madeleine, "the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself."

Amy Lin

Details: Qiu Xiaofei
Where: Boers-Li Gallery
When: Through April 6, 2008