Xiaochuan Deshayes: Arcadie 
24 September-6 November, 2026, Shanghai 
Text by Vince Dang

Two people spend an afternoon by the sea. The holiday brings life to a temporary halt, and leisure lends their time together a sense of self-sufficiency. The summer at Étretat, the small Normandy town depicted in Xiaochuan’s paintings, carries an almost frivolous promise that it might last. Yet a holiday feels free precisely because everyday life continues to run elsewhere. This blessed ground was never a place where one could stay for good; its edges appear wherever order begins to reassert itself. 

In Virgil’s Eclogues, Corydon declares his love for Alexis and invites him into a rural life, to pass the days together between singing, herding and labour. The invitation, however, offers no unconditional shelter. Staying and exile coexist within the same landscape, which accommodates desires that find no place in reality while preserving the distances created by status and possession. [1] The “Arcadie” of the exhibition title emerges from precisely this contradiction: it points to a brief escape into an Arcadian setting, while the fated return that follows every retreat casts over it a shadow of nostalgia and loss.[2]

Nor is “Arcadie” merely an idealized Arcadia. In 1954, André Baudry founded an underground community of that name in Paris. Through publishing and social network, it linked individuals who had until then been isolated, giving the literary ideal a concrete form of mutual support. The group was later criticized by radical liberation movements as conservative and compliant; subsequent historical research has shown how it opened up spaces of association within a repressive society. [3] This oscillation between shelter and compromise lends “Arcadie” a further layer of meaning. Those who enter it hope for recognition, but must also consider how to present themselves: which desires may be made public, what kind of life counts as respectable, and how much self-restraint the individual must exercise in exchange for the security of the community.

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Xiaochuan carries these questions from landscape and collective forms into the narrow scale of close observation and private space: a room, a bed, a close-up. These settings are not neutral containers; they also bear the narrative of a life centred on the nuclear family. Drawing on a consensus about what constitutes a “fulfilled life”, society grants belonging to certain desires while placing others in a position that demands explanation. Power thereby enters the private sphere, shaping through care, counsel and discipline an image of who deserves to be loved. The disorder and displacement of queer experience continually challenge the normativity of this ideal, and the un-reconciled violence that flows through his paintings stems from a lived sense of what life is actually like. This violence exposes the conditions attached to the acceptance “Arcadie” offers. It asks how much deviation from its ideal image the “Arcadie” can tolerate, and whether the bodies deemed deviant can, through their own desire, rearrange space and relationships anew.

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As body and paint become entangled, time and space lose their stability. Curling, turning and distortion draw the figures away from upright poses, while smearing and seepage alter the way flesh appears. The closeness of bodies and the act of peering between them release a rebellious erotic energy. These bodies lose their spatial anchoring and acquire a sense of time distinct from the everyday order. Reclining torsos seem momentarily relieved of their weight, yet the traces of colour running down the canvas remain pulled by gravity, brushing past contours and drawing the posture of rest into a slow dissolution. The idle body thus takes on a hesitancy without losing its pleasure. The politics of Expressionism is gathered here into an intimate format, where beauty and damage seep into one another through a shared texture.

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Amid the tangled threads of diasporic experience, bodily memory and kinship, Xiaochuan adopts retention and reuse as a strategy, re-organizing them into a line of self-expression. He uses old clothing, household linen and textiles as the grounds for some of his works. Laden with meaning before any image arrives, these supports turn painting into a palimpsest over the residue of life. The fabrics have left their original uses behind, yet in the making of the image they reawaken their ties to the body and the home. The re-purposing of memory and the making of “Arcadie” echo each other here. Beyond either assimilation into existing cultural codes or their outright rejection, Xiaochuan carefully preserves certain attachments, or certain wounds, in order to adjust the position of desire and the ways of living alongside it. At this point we can grasp the complexity of the work. He combines oil painting technique, Chinese ink line drawing and unstable, nonperspectival compositions, so that several systems of seeing interfere with one another, producing bodies that refuse a unified spatial scale and images that belong to no single tradition. Floating figures and symbolic pictograms bring the paintings close to the mystery of the Transavanguardia, yet they never leave embodied experience behind. This mixture is essential to reading the exhibition: if belonging must be bought by erasing difference, shelter once again becomes discipline. Painting, by contrast, allows incompatible parts to go on coexisting and keeps their friction on the surface. 

 

“Arcadie” thus acquires a scale closer to hand than any ideal land. It appears briefly within life, is then doubted and revised, and at other moments becomes credible once more. It concerns, above all, whether a person can live according to their own feelings, how they bear the complexity of relationships, and how they build a world of their own from within them. Through painting, Xiaochuan gives shape to these experiences while preserving what drifts between reality and fantasy. His pictures allow for pain, impermanence and hysteria, holding both the urgency of desire and the slowness of the everyday. And the joy found in this “Arcadie” can still be real and valid: it need not be diminished for being brief, nor made to stand as the whole answer to life.

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