I’m Xingjian(my friends call me Pete and you can too), a painter based in Brooklyn and working between Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Mexico City. I make atmosphere-driven figurative work that filters personal histories and fantasies through an existential lens, with recent focus on displacement and cultural crossings.
In Mexico City, where personal ties grew into lived experience, the city continues to unfold as both subject and mirror: fiestas and clockwork rain, masks and social divides, a collective somber, potent love, violent hurt. A romantic undercurrent runs through these encounters, shaping how they resurface in painting.
I build surfaces through layering and veiling - soft translucent oils and acrylics that open visual portals between charged sites and shifting selves. White reserves, hidden recurring symbols, and images-within-images function as motifs; fragmentary titles act as triggers. Painting past events introduces a delay between living and understanding, where meaning is fabricated, revised, or left suspended.
I hold a BFA from the School of Visual Arts. In the past year I’ve worked closely with independent spaces and personal projects on dreams and identity, while also researching curatorial possibilities around the surreal charge of Mexico City - how it echoes a colonial elegy and reappears today amid gentrification, digital nomads, and misfits alike.
Reach me -> dxj006@gmail.com
2025
Fragments in Our Home; L’appartment 49C, New York, NY
2024
Conferences; LivingSkin, Brooklyn, NY
2023
Backyard Dreams Keep Me Awake 2; Tutu Gallery, NY
2022
Understatements; Godwin-Ternbach Museum, NY
2020
Backyard Dreams Keep Me Awake; Tutu Gallery, Online
2018
Modern Expressions of Traditions; Metropolitan Pavilion, New York, NY
2017
Light Up Therapy Resort; with Shanghai PSA at Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Shanghai, CN
Poisoned Apples & Smoking Lamps; SVA Chelsea Gallery, New York, NY
Press:
2022
“Asian-American Identity Through Quiet, Ordinary Gestures”
Hyperallergic
2018
“LIGHT UP Therapy Resort”
NYU Tisch School of the Arts