Xiaochi Dong: Leaves Leave
Incubator is pleased to present new work by Xiaochi Dong that work draws from Eastern and Western visual languages in equal measure, finding in their convergence a space to think carefully about nature, observation, and care.
The exhibition begins with a shift in perspective. Soft Gems, a dispersed field of 38 bulbous polymer ceramic forms, each painted in vivid colour, are derived from the eyes of the chameleons Dong keeps. The encounter is disorienting in the best sense: scale collapses, and the viewer is made suddenly small, as if having stepped inside the terrarium environments these creatures inhabit. It is a quiet reversal — one that the exhibition returns to throughout. While we look, we are also being looked at.
This instability of observation runs through every aspect of the work. Dong tends dart frogs and chameleons daily, building and maintaining the terrariums they live in, and the greenhouse — as architecture, atmosphere, and ethical relation — becomes a structuring metaphor across the show. These are environments shaped by acts of care, where tending and watching are inseparable, and where the creatures within are never fully available to the gaze.
Material is central to this thinking. Akadama soil — the same substrate Dong uses to build his terrariums and cultivate bonsai and tropical plants — is incorporated directly into the paintings, mixed with ink, acrylic, and pastel. The painted surface becomes less an image of landscape and more a ground itself: something that holds and absorbs. Mark-making draws from dian tai (点苔), a classical brushwork technique used to suggest the accumulation of moss, allowing forms to emerge gradually and atmospherically rather than through direct description.
A series of three large paintings, each composed across five vertical panels, take their dimensions from the glass structures on the upper level of the Palm House at Kew Gardens. By maintaining a direct relationship to the architecture of that humid, constructed space, the paintings function as thresholds, inviting the viewer to imaginatively inhabit rather than simply observe. A further group of works responds to the building's spiral staircase, its coiling structure becoming both subject and compositional logic.
A group of sculptures composed of painted garden tools stacked across terracotta pots extends the exhibition's concerns into three dimensions. The pots are treated not as containers but as pictorial surfaces, their exteriors painted with the same layered materials as the canvases. Traces of amphibians — frogs moving across handles and rims — appear on close inspection, quiet symbols of life persisting within and against human order. A larger sculptural work arranges five columns of stacked pots together, across which light and shadow reveal the silhouette of a whippet — caught mid-walk across a lawn being traced by an irrigation sprinkler, a scene rendered in shadow rather than image. The dog has featured as a recurring muse in Dong's paintings, and the form here is tender and slightly spectral: a presence suggested rather than declared.
Throughout, Dong refuses to position nature as something external or safely contained. The exhibition proposes instead a more immersed condition, in which perception is unstable, roles are exchanged, and the boundary between observer and observed is never quite settled.
Dong takes inspiration from artificial landscapes of varying scales, including cultivated landscapes and garden systems, botanical conservatories, and miniature eco-systems. His works reflect a continuous fascination with nature and a quiet pursuit of care, simulation, and symbiosis. Drawing loosely on the notion of Gaianism, he explores the interconnectedness between organic life, built environments, and
atmospheric cycles.
His creative endeavors primarily encompass painting and mixed-media pieces. By creating images saturated with hints of light, humidity and atmosphere, Dong aims to give form to contemporary images of nature.