Nights at the Circus

"Nights at the Circus" is a solo exhibition of paintings by Lingrou Xie at Nan Ke Gallery. It takes its title from Angela Carter's magical realist novel of the same name, in which an aerialist with possibly invented wings is pursued by a journalist asking whether she is fact or fiction. Xie's paintings show women who rarely reveal themselves in full, their figures receding into plants, light and layered images drawn from cinema, literature and memory. The gallery space becomes a temporary "circus tent", asking whether women can use existing fantasies to reinvent themselves.