Boers-Li Gallery is pleased to announce its newest exhibition: a QIU Xiaofei solo exhibition entitled House of Recollected Fragments. It is the artist's first solo show in China in two years, and his work has grown significantly more theoretically informed and aesthetically mature in the intervening years. It has also become more confident in its own semiotics and acting as a bridge between artistic generations. After this exhibition, he will be showing in the Art Premiere category of Art 39 Basel later this spring. QIU Xiaofei is a young Beijing-based artist whose practice represents a unique articulation of the relationship between concept and aesthetics. His past work has largely been concerned with the role of materiality in perception, the relationship between memory and history, the subjective nature of lived experience, and the whimsical qualities of childhood. For this solo exhibition, he offers a number of large-scale installations, almost all created for this show, that deal with more complex variations on similar themes. The viewer is confronted with a series of environments and experiences derived from the artist's imperfect memories of childhood: A sculpted and painted meat grinder examines sensory perceptions and a surplus of affect. A set of sculpted doors that lead nowhere creates an entirely mental space of movement. A vastly enlarged coil of mosquito-repellent incense recalls the passage of time through one of the artist's strongest memories of his first months in Beijing. Blank white frames containing canvases covered over with and dripping black paint imitate a childhood dream in which the artist defaced a set of paintings in a museum. A pair of sculpted ice skates calls to mind the violence of schoolyard fights. Massively oversized building blocks recreate the perceptions of youthful creativity. Multitudes of gas canisters recall a story from the artist's hometown in which a man, living entirely in his own mental world, committed suicide by surrounding himself with similar tanks. These pieces may be derived from QIU Xiaofei's memory, but the connection to history is more disjunctive than mimetic; indeed, the artist's remembrances bear a dauntingly complex relationship to the reproduction of either the real or the imagined image. The installations presented here are stark and distorted, and the artist's use of scale, color, and negative space is jarring but skilled. The Freudian apparatus of dream production is clearly at work here: memories are displaced onto bizarre and unexpected signifiers, and whole segments of youth are condensed into symbolic images. QIU's work, however, moves far beyond any simple longing for the past, and even moves beyond a meditation on nostalgia for a time that never existed. Rather, this work represents a complicated attempt to tease out precisely how experience is filtered through perception, how these perceptions are warped by time, how memory recall again filters experience, and how all of these processes together form the intertwining threads of the reality of a time that has always already passed.