Artist Reception: Thursday, September 11, 6 PM
Exhibition: September 12 – November 01, 2025
Mai 36 Galerie is pleased to present Afterglow, the second solo exhibition of Leon Xu (b. 1995, Zhongshan, China; lives and works in New York) at the gallery.
The exhibition finds its point of departure in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, a film where every desire sets off a chain of punishment, where control slips steadily from view, and where the city at night becomes both stage and trap. Xu was drawn to this tenor of disarray and arbitrariness – the awareness that life moves according to forces that cannot be steered. Afterglow unfolds through images drawn from the film – not as straightforward retellings but as painterly interpretations, where narrative gives way to atmosphere: a nocturnal space in which longing is met with unease and the glow of an occurrence lingers long after it has passed.
Read together, the paintings can be seen as tracing a dramatic arc of such a night – the mounting tension of chance encounters, the heightened intensity of disorientation, the suspension of climax, and the calm resolution that follows. Each work functions like a scene that has slipped out of order, pieced together as a sequence of rising and falling sensations.
What Xu offers are not images to be deciphered but moments to be felt. His paintings resist fixed contours, asking the eye to dwell in uncertainty until recognition arrives. This instability is less about representation than about perception itself – the way memory sharpens and slips, the way a fleeting impression can suddenly feel luminous. In this sense, Xu’s images do not only recall; they also heighten the present, making us aware of how easily beauty passes unnoticed until it is nearly gone.
The paintings carry this tension in their surfaces. Rendered in Xu’s blend of airbrush and acrylic, they hover between legibility and blur, presence and disappearance. A skyline trembles through the haze of a moving car, neon lettering flickers against the dark, veils of light disintegrate before they come into focus. Each work emerges like a scene recalled too late – half-memory, half-dream, suspended at the threshold of recognition.
While preparing for the exhibition, Xu’s practice was interrupted by a car accident, a rupture that altered his rhythm in the studio and led to new ways of working – quietly reflecting the film’s central question of how we move forward when control falters.
In the exhibition Xu uses his practice as both encounter and echo: each painting holds onto what cannot be held, offering only the faint shimmer of what remains. It is in this afterglow, between longing and unease, memory and dream, that Xu situates his work.
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Leon Xu (b. 1995, Zhongshan, China) studied Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania and Painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He has presented solo exhibitions at Helena Anrather (New York), Whaam! (New York), and Mai 36 Galerie (Zurich) as well as group shows with Perrotin (New York) and Karma (New York). His work has also been included in group exhibitions at Capsule Shanghai, West Bund Art Fair, and Art Basel Miami Beach, and is held in private and institutional collections in Europe, Asia, and the United States.