Xu Yang, Forget Me Not: These Fragments I have Shored12 Images
“It clicked in my head one day that Yang’s work needed to be shown here,” curator Lucy von Goetz explains as we have lunch in the garden of the Château de Lantheuil, the extravagant Louis XIII-style estate, constructed by French nobleman and military officer Antoine Turgot de Saint-Clair in 1613. The château, which has borne witness to several historical events, such as WWII, where it was occupied by both the Germans and the British, now hosts artist Xu Yang’s latest exhibition, Forget Me Not: These Fragments I have Shored, curated by von Goetz.
Inspired by the Rococo era, her Chinese heritage and the National Trust properties she visited when she first moved to the UK from China at 18, Xu’s work and this exhibition in particular ask: Who gets to have their portrait on a wall? And what kind of walls have portraits on them?
As you walk through the château, you see portraits of Louis XIV and the Turgot family, along with sculptures of Marie Antoinette. It reminds you of how desperate these individuals were to be admired and remembered. While Forget Me Not: These Fragments I have Shored is an exhibition about memory – specifically, what it means to remember – it focuses on the objects, moments and everyday things we forget. In her still life painting “Centrefold (We are born alone, we die alone, and in between we spend our time looking)”, forget-me-not flowers adorn the top of the Marie Antoinette-inspired wig. “It’s the most insignificant flower,” Xu explains. “But the name is a reminder to remember the small moments in life, what is happening in your everyday, because that is the most precious thing.”
Examining the painting closer, it becomes apparent that there is a bird’s nest with eggs entangled in the wig with tulips, grapes, wheat, grass and more. “The wheat and the grass are fundamental to our existence,” Xu tells me. “I think they symbolise the common people. The tulip is a luxury flower in Holland, and the grapes symbolise Dionysus [the ancient Greek god of wine and ecstasy] and his love of parties. This series is made up of portraits of society because they represent people from high to low.”
While Forget Me Not: These Fragments I have Shored, is a body of work that Xu developed to be in dialogue with the château’s existing artwork and architecture, the paintings and sculpture she created have sharp edges, poking and prodding at the behaviours of the upper classes of today, and those who once roamed the halls of the château.
Her paintings of dogs are a comment on the ridiculous and brutal treatment of animals by the rich: “My art studio is based in Chelsea, so my friends and I have the fortune of seeing a lot of fancy-looking dogs, who quite often don’t know how fortunate they are,” Xu tells Dazed. “The title of this painting, ‘Untitled Society Portrait Le Pouf Sentimental’, is named after Antoinette’s wig. Chelsea dogs often have better lives than some of their owners. So I decided to paint a series of dogs, not only to show the absurdity of the elaborately adorned animal but also how much humans have altered nature,” she continues. “Chihuahuas are bred for human amusement and companionship. If you were to release them back into the wild, they would all die because they are so small and have no hunting ability. That’s how much we have altered the species. They no longer belong to nature; they belong to us.”
One of the other dog paintings in the series, titled “Untitled (Society Portrait – Bureaucracy Feathers)”, depicts a Pekingese dog similarly echoing the formal conventions of aristocratic portraiture, inspired by the real-life female Pekingese dog acquired by Captain John Hart Dunne during the looting of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860. The story goes that the British stole 30 Pekingese dogs, and only one survived. They flippantly named her “Looty”, viewing the violent acquisition of other nations and their goods as socially acceptable. “The UK still has her body somewhere in a taxidermy in London,” von Goetz says during a tour of the château. “The exchange between cultures has a really cruel history,” Xu adds. “I want to use this to represent how things were taken from other cultures and remember this part of history. Things like this still happen today, but in more subdued ways.”
Even when invoking and interrogating the past, Xu’s work is firmly rooted in imagining new, bright, better futures. As Xu and I sat together at lunch and dinner, our conversation is continually drawn back to politics, discussing our disbelief and anger in the scapegoating and demonisation of immigrants in the UK and the US and the UK Supreme courts abhorrent ruling that the legal definition of a woman will be based on “biological sex”. She also reminds me of the importance of sticking up for yourself as a person of colour – that politeness in the face of discrimination gets you nowhere, but also the importance of not letting hate harden your heart. Her painting “A Dream of Everything that was Wanted”, which reimagines Pegasus, taking inspiration from George Stubbs’s “Whistlejacket and Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus” (2005), reflects this belief.
“I realised the reason I kept drawing pictures of Pegasus is because of all the shit going on right now in politics,” she confessed. “He has a tragic story, his birth a result of the murder of his mother Medusa, but still he stayed pure and good of heart. Pegasus reminds us that we need to stay pure, no matter our situation. I think unicorns represent the best part of everyone because we believed in them when we were little. Maybe we should all start believing in them again because believing in their existence is like having faith in the best parts of humanity.”
Forget Me Not: These Fragments I have Shored is running at the Château de Lantheuil, France, until 10 July 2025.
