Now Representing: Leon Xu

Mai 36 Galerie is pleased to announce the representation of Leon Xu (*1995, Zhongshan, China, lives and works in New York).

Leon Xu’s work explores the boundaries between memory, identity, and place. Drawing on his background as a Chinese-born immigrant in the United States, Xu creates paintings which engage with themes of cultural displacement, emotional residue, and the tension between visibility and obscurity.

His paintings dwell on peripheral beauty - the overlooked moments that pass at the edge of attention: flowers from a corner bodega, sunlight on a windshield, a neon sign at night.

Rendered in soft palettes and layered textures, these scenes carry a cinematic quality, at once deeply personal and universally familiar. Xu’s practice resists rigid narrative. These are not scenes from one life, but moments anyone might recognize. His paintings ask to be felt rather than deciphered. Suspended between joy and melancholy, desire and loss, Xu’s work returns our attention to the present, to a beauty that so often goes unnoticed until it is nearly gone.

Leon Xu was born in 1995 in Zongshan, China, and raised in San Francisco. He 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 Olney Gleason (New York), Perrotin (New York), Karma (New York) and Setareh (London).

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Portrait by Sirui Ma