Andrew Reed Gallery is excited to announce The house of day, the house of night, Beijing-based artist Xi Liu’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show opens this Thursday, September 10th with a reception from 6-8pm.

The conceptual starting point for this body of work draws from Dom dzienny, dom nocny (House of Day, House of Night) by Polish‐born author Olga Tokarczuk. Within the novel, the house is more than a mere building or dwelling vessel. It evolves into a composite space that links reality and memory, individual life and historical time, everyday experience and the subconscious.

Through her spatial perception and artistic practice, Xi holds true a core conviction: human life is finite and fleeting, whereas objects and spatial carriers possess permanence that transcends individual existence. They continuously absorb successive generations’ habitation, migration, vanishing and forgetting, acting as enduring vessels for life trajectories and temporal traces. Space is therefore not a neutral, empty container. Instead, it functions as a temporal material medium: it preserves events that once unfolded within it and bears the living imprints of those who have departed. The meaning of space derives not solely from its present physical form, but from the cumulative layering of lived activities, relationships, memories, and emotions accumulated over time.

Accordingly, Xi interprets “the house” as a structure with dual ontological dimensions. The “house of day” first corresponds to experiential, phenomenal space. It is the tangible site where bodies inhabit, labor, rest, pass through, observe and act. Walls, windows, doors, lighting, and furniture constitute a perceptible, measurable physical order. Subject to three‐dimensional geometry, it embodies an individual’s most immediate encounter with the real world. By contrast, the “house of night” points to an ontological dimension that cannot be fully visualized. It is not merely a space of darkness, but a mental field activated by memory, dreams, the subconscious, emotions and past experiences.