Do Angels Need Haircuts

Solo show
Xiao Hanqiu
Tabula Rasa Gallery London
21 December 2024 – 18 January 2025

Tabula Rasa Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition Do Angels Need Haircuts by Beijing-based painter and poet Xiao Hanqiu, opening on 21 December at our Beijing space. This marks the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will also feature an essay specially written for the occasion by writer Chen Xi’an, offering further insight into Xiao’s poetic and painterly world.

With her latest works, all completed in 2024, Xiao unveils a collection that unfolds like a book inspired by the genre of young girl literature. Through her oil and watercolour paintings, she crafts visual poems that intertwine coy, evocative imagery with layered symbolism. Delicate forms and surreal contrasts play together in her works, evoking a dreamlike metonymy that dissolves the boundaries between body and object.

Among Xiao's works are paintings of embodied gestures set against neutral or ethereal backdrops, emphasising the expressive power of hands, feet, and limbs, distilling the body into minimalist yet evocative compositions, weaving gestures into a visual language. The repetition of hands, feet, and subtle transformations creates a rhythm, each frame linked yet distinct, like stanzas of a larger narrative.

Through her layered imagery, Xiao transforms fleeting gestures into timeless, symbolic tableaux. Each painting reimagines performance as a visual collage, resonating with quiet dynamism and distilled meaning. These works are not merely depictions of movement but contemplations on its essence—each one lingering like an afterimage in the viewer’s mind. Xiao Hanqiu invites us into a world where innocence, transformation, and the power of the body intertwine, creating a poignant and richly imaginative universe.

Excerpted from Chen Xi’an's article





About the Artist

XIAO Hanqiu (b.1986 in Beijing, China) is a painter and a poet based in Beijing, China. Xiao’s paintings on canvas juxtapose objects in situations that conjure the ethereal magic and intensity of being. Her paintings operate like her poems—linear narrative is rejected in favour of open questions that reflect on the complexity, ineffability, and inconstancy of experience. Xiao received her MA Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2011, and BA Fine Art from Leeds University in 2008.

Her solo and duo exhibitions include: Do Angels Need Haircuts, Tabula Rasa Gallery (Beijing, 2024); Sci-Fi Doomsday/Lost in Wonderland, Shekou Gallery (Shenzhen, 2023); Love Stories and Horror Stories, Lyles and King (New York, 2022); Honey, Bee, Tabula Rasa Gallery (London, 2021); LISTE, dual solo booth, presented by Tabula Rasa Gallery (Basel, 2021); There May Be No Pearls in This Shell, Leo Gallery (Shanghai, 2020); Skating Through the Gallery With Tricksy Snakes, Tabula Rasa Gallery (Beijing, 2018); That’s Quite Something, Canton Gallery (Guangzhou, 2018); Self-portrait, Tabula Rasa Gallery (Beijing, 2016). 

Selected group exhibitions include: ORBITAL, Nova Contemporary (Bangkok, 2024); NADA Miami, presented by Tabula Rasa Gallery (Miami, 2023); Contemporary Myths and Artifacts, Stads Gasverk (Stockholm, 2023); Minor Attractions × Cornershop (London, 2023); Magic Square: Art and Literature in Mirror Image, Beijing Biennial (Beijing, 2023); Becoming Creature, Tabula Rasa Gallery (London, 2022); Tabula Rasa Vista, Tabula Rasa Gallery (Beijing, 2020). 

She has published four poem collections: Losing Everything is Beautiful (2022), A dream come true The worst idea ever (2019), Three Minutes to Midnight Flower Thief (2018), and Four Hearts (2015).