Forget Me Not: These Fragments I have Shored
Xu Yang at the Château de Lantheuil
By Lucy von Goetz
Forget Me Not presents a lavish, reflective, and culturally layered exploration of memory, identity, and the tension between permanence and ephemerality.
Drawing its title from the delicate forget-me-not flower, the exhibition asks us what it means to remember. Across cultures, the forget-me-not has stood for remembrance, affection, and the enduring thread of human connection. Because of their small, delicate size they symbolise modesty and the quiet strength of love and memory. The flower’s name, its insistence - “do not forget me” - becomes the core proposition of Xu Yang’s exhibition.
The curatorial framework of Forget Me Not touches on T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, asking how the act of remembrance might become a tool for liberation:
“This is the use of memory:
For liberation — not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past.”
Here memory is not only an archive, but an active liberatory force. It can unshackle us from nostalgia and from the fears and desires we attach to the future. It is the nature of memory to transcend present experience and guard the past, just as it is the nature of desire to transcend the present and reach toward the future. Xu’s artworks step boldly into this terrain, weaving Chinese and European creative legacies into works that reimagine history, identity, and power.
Xu’s still-life wig compositions are perhaps the most conceptually layered works in the show. Atop lush pink wigs sprout not just flowers and jewels, but wheat, grasses, and fruits — constructing what she calls “a portrait of an entire society.” The wigs are mounted on Chinese opera mask stands, fusing visual languages: the pastel excesses of the European Rococo, the codified gestures of Chinese opera, the ornamental exuberance of drag, and the performative instability of identity. The pink for the hair is carefully chosen. Xu deliberately selects a shade that resists racial connotation and destabilises gendered assumptions, allowing the wigs to function as potent symbols of constructed identity. Historically, pink was seen as a masculine colour, only later becoming associated with femininity in the mid-20th century.
The Rococo, emerging in early 18th-century France after the death of Louis XIV, marked a shift from the Baroque’s moralising theatricality to a celebration of intimate pleasures and ephemeral delights. Artists such as Jean-Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard pioneered a visual language of asymmetry, pastel hues, and sensual frivolity, immortalising the aristocratic fête galante and its worlds of courtship, fantasy, and escapism. Xu’s work reminds us that Rococo excess unfolded against a backdrop of political instability and impending revolution. A friction that resonates powerfully with today’s social landscape.
These opulent still-life wigs allude to the extravagant poufs of Marie Antoinette, whose towering hairdos became not only personal statements but political tools. Xu reframes these adornments as proto-drag, foregrounding their role in the construction of gendered and social identity. The meticulous rendering of pink wigs and lush textiles invites reflection on the soft power embedded in feminine self-fashioning — a quiet and oft dismissed form of agency. The extravagant pouf hairstyle, originally created by the famed hairdresser Léonard Autié, made its debut in April 1774 when the Duchesse de Chartres wore the Pouf Sentimental to the opera—an enormous structure adorned with 14 yards of gauze, figurines, a parrot, and even a plate of cherries. This imaginative and towering style quickly captivated the French aristocracy, allowing women to express personal sentiments and moods through elaborate decorations such as ships, animals, feathers, and jewels.
Xu’s paintings become moral and social landscapes, mapping the intersecting forces of nature, culture, class, and gender. They resonate with the tradition of artists like Jan Brueghel the Elder, whose Vase of Flowers (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) famously scatters jewels across its base, blurring the line between nature and artifice, ephemerality and wealth.
The flowers, insects and nature in these compositions evoke the Dutch Golden Age, particularly the luminous flower pieces of Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750). Ruysch’s meticulous arrangements, praised for their tonal control and spatial mastery, offered moral reflections on impermanence and mortality. The red-and-white striped tulip in Xu’s paintings recalls the historic Dutch “tulip mania,” when in the 1620s a single Semper Augustus bulb could fetch 20,000 stuivers. This was more than twice a skilled craftsman’s annual wage, reflecting the period’s obsession with rarity and status. Xu’s work reactivates the still-life tradition, emphasising the ephemeral: the curling petal, the overripe fruit, the cracking eggshell.
Early Chinese flower painting, particularly during the Song Dynasty (960–1279), emphasised the symbolic resonance of botanical subjects. The plum blossom, for instance, represented resilience in adversity, blooming most vibrantly amid winter snow. Similarly, the lotus symbolised purity and transcendence, its roots in muddy water evoking spiritual elevation. These motifs, inherited through centuries of Chinese visual culture, resonate in Xu’s floral and fruit arrangements, where baby’s breath (purity), pomegranate (fertility), fig (milk and nourishment), and gooseberry (folkloric pursuit of happiness) fuse together her visual lexicon.
Xu’s inclusion of aggressive or unsettling creatures — the Asian hornet who devours bees, the shrike who impales prey — introduces a darker pulse to these lush compositions, recalling the predatory undercurrents in nature. The burning candle, cracked egg, and slow-moving snail evoke the vanitas still life, where material splendour is counterbalanced by symbols of decay and mortality. In this sense, Xu’s work positions itself within a cross-cultural lineage of artistic meditation on time: a recognition that memory, like beauty, is both precious and precarious, poised perpetually on the edge of disappearance. As Psalm 103:15 reminds us: “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.” Xu’s art does not merely catalogue vanitas; it probes whether art is a conquest of transience, or a profound acknowledgement of it.
Xu draws on Surrealist traditions, gently evoking the work of Roland Penrose. His Seeing is Believing (1937), with its disorienting play of blonde hair and urban landscape, resonates with Xu’s own play between the decorative and the unsettling, the familiar and the uncanny. Like Penrose, Xu dramatises performance: the wig becomes both costume and landscape, the still life becomes both portrait and stage.
Xu’s dog series, Society Portraits are among the most striking works in the exhibition. Featuring one regal Pekingese and two elaborately adorned Chihuahuas, these paintings slyly echo the formal conventions of aristocratic portraiture. The Pekingese, bred by Chinese emperors to resemble guardian lions, was once so elevated that non-royals were required to bow before them. One was gifted to Queen Victoria in 1860, acquired in the looting of the Old Summer Palace near Beijing. Xu draws on this complex lineage, from Tang dynasty imperial courts to European palaces, crafting a meditation on colonial appropriation, inherited status, and cultural spectacle.
The Chihuahuas sit proudly on sumptuous cushions, their tiny heads crowned with wigs, surrounded by pearls and fine fabric, one with a little Chinese opera mask on its collar. Xu draws a playful connection to Marie Antoinette’s beloved pug, Mops — the childhood pet she was forced to surrender upon entering France, but later reunited with at Versailles, where Mops lived out his life in splendour.
John Berger writes that the animal in art becomes a projection screen for human fears, fantasies, and longings. Xu’s dogs are not simply pets: they are aristocrats, actors, symbols, mirrors. Xu’s dog portraits expose the absurdities of class and power, the fragility of status, and the enduring human impulse to immortalise, adorn, and control.
Xu’s surrealist influence emerges vividly in Forget Me Not. Her Pegasus painting, A Dream of Everything that was Wanted, is rendered in dreamy pinks and rearing up like George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket (c. 1762), one of the most arresting equine portraits in British art. Pegasus was born from the blood of the slain Medusa. Xu layers Greek myth over contemporary pop culture (Barbie-pink hues) to produce a surreal meditation on escape and reinvention and the duality of tragedy and transcendence. As the Surrealists believed, myth and dream operate as powerful tools for disrupting normative reality, opening spaces for suppressed or marginalised histories (Short, 1996). The Pegasus set against a backdrop that evokes a cathedral dome destabilises familiar boundaries between sacred and profane, tragedy and redemption.
Xu’s chalice sculptures, inspired by European ritual vessels and Chinese incense burners, reference the myth of Pandora’s jar - the vessel from which all the world’s evils were released, leaving only hope behind. Here, the chalices become symbolic containers of resilience, with gold elements to reflect the paradoxical endurance and fragility of hope in times of turmoil.
Unsettling in their animate quality, the chalices are adorned with eyes that stare unflinchingly at the viewer, a reminder of Saint Lucy, the Christian martyr and patron saint of sight. These vessels sit as agents of surveillance, witness, and moral questioning.
Carl Jung proposed that memory encompasses both the personal and collective unconscious, with inherited archetypes shaping our experiences. Xu’s works draw on these archetypal forms - the wing, the eye, the horse, the chalice — all symbols of fragility, transcendence, and the constant negotiation between the material and the spiritual.
Gold gleams on several of Xu’s works, both as material and metaphor. Chemically inert, gold retains its lustre across centuries, evoking permanence, power, and allure. But as Pindar wrote in the fifth century BCE, “Neither moth nor rust devoureth it, but the mind of man is devoured by this supreme possession.” Xu’s gilded surfaces are reflective, dazzling, alluring. They confront us with the paradox: gold adorns, gold elevates, gold destroys.
Among the most poignant works in the exhibition are Xu’s ceramic dumplings — delicate, uncanny, and imprinted with the artist’s own fingerprints. These sculptures honour the domestic rituals and familial intimacies that anchor Xu’s cultural identity. These charming plumpette dumplings, fragile yet hardened, echo the surrealist fascination with material paradox. They appear soft but are not; they seem edible but are untouchable. They honour the domestic rituals of family, cultural transmission, and handmade care.
The relationship between the universal and the intimate is palpable: while the chalices evoke broad human themes of hope and ritual, the dumplings anchor the exhibition in the tactile textures of Xu’s own life. As her aunt remarked when seeing the artist photograph the dumpling-making process, “Why film this? I can make them for you any time.” For Xu, this is precisely the point. It is the daily, repeated, often unnoticed acts that ground us within histories of love, memory, and cultural survival.
The Château de Lantheuil is an active participant in the exhibition’s narrative, with its layered past. Its ancestral portraits, mythological 18th-century fans adorned with allegories of power and pastoral virtue, and its relics from the age of Louis XIV. All this creates what Xu calls a mise en abyme: history within history, memory within memory. One poignant detail is the red bow seen in portraits of the young Louis XIV, painted before his transformation into the “Sun King.” This small visual flourish, part of the habit à la française, signals the performance of princely status, and the construction of power through costume and representation. Xu’s contemporary interventions do not mimic or parody these objects; they converse with them, reveal their fractures, their silences, and the absences that haunt all acts of preservation.
Who is remembered? Who is forgotten? In what ways do objects — whether fans, dumplings, or jewellery — carry forward the traces of human longing, vulnerability, and aspiration?
Returning to Eliot’s Little Gidding, we are reminded:
“The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration.
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.”
Forget Me Not confronts the paradoxes of love, loss, beauty, and power. Xu Yang’s artworks acknowledge the brutality of time, but they also insist on the possibility of transfiguration — of legacy remade, of desire expanded beyond possession, of love freed from history’s grip.
In the grand rooms of Château de Lantheuil, surrounded by centuries of faces and objects, Xu’s works remind us: to remember is not simply to look backward. It is to forge new patterns, to imagine new futures, and to arrive — as Eliot has it — at the place we started, knowing it for the first time.
Works featured (left to right)
Centrefold (In perpetuum et unum diem / Forever and one day), 2024 - 2025, Oil on linen, 140 x 80cm
Untitled (Society Portrait - In Our Idleness), 2024, Oil on linen, 70 x 80cm
Centrefold (In perpetuum et unum diem / Forever and one day), Detail
References
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