Alice Gong Xiaowen (Canadian, b. 1994, Beijing) lives and works in New York. Gong Xiaowen received a MFA from Yale School of Art (2025) and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016).
Alice Gong Xiaowen is drawn to processes of indexing as meditations on anticipating loss, allowing action to become a means of mitigating that which is becoming distant, disintegrating, or slipping away, yet made anew. Material translation helps bear witness, offering stills from an exhaustive effort to secure toeholds onto that which is constantly in a state of atrophy, creating relics from remnants of sound and texture that are no longer exercised, through the reconjuring of memory. Gong Xiaowen distills sensory artifacts through the lens of materiality, personal, geopolitical, historical, and abstract. Her thoughts linger on the conceptual connotations of matter once mediated and interpreted as material culture. Crafted and ready-made objects produce a collage of referents that intentionally signify, allude, and defamiliarize, suspending the potential and discrepancies of aural and visual language.
Gong Xiaowen has participated in numerous exhibitions, including recent solo and two-person exhibitions at Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai (2025); lower cavity, Holyoke (2024); and House of Seiko, San Francisco (2023). Group exhibitions include Kiang Malingue, New York (2025); Romance, Pittsburgh (2025); Still Life, Shanghai (2024); and Franz Kaka, Toronto (2024).
Alice Gong Xiaowen is drawn to processes of indexing as meditations on anticipating loss, allowing action to become a means of mitigating that which is becoming distant, disintegrating, or slipping away, yet made anew. Material translation helps bear witness, offering stills from an exhaustive effort to secure toeholds onto that which is constantly in a state of atrophy, creating relics from remnants of sound and texture that are no longer exercised, through the reconjuring of memory. Gong Xiaowen distills sensory artifacts through the lens of materiality, personal, geopolitical, historical, and abstract. Her thoughts linger on the conceptual connotations of matter once mediated and interpreted as material culture. Crafted and ready-made objects produce a collage of referents that intentionally signify, allude, and defamiliarize, suspending the potential and discrepancies of aural and visual language.
Gong Xiaowen has participated in numerous exhibitions, including recent solo and two-person exhibitions at Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai (2025); lower cavity, Holyoke (2024); and House of Seiko, San Francisco (2023). Group exhibitions include Kiang Malingue, New York (2025); Romance, Pittsburgh (2025); Still Life, Shanghai (2024); and Franz Kaka, Toronto (2024).
