Incidentals: Xiangni Song at VillageOneArt

Xiangni Song, Incidentals. Exhibition view at VillageOneArt, New York City, 2026. Courtesy of the artists and VillageOneArt.

By YEZI LOU Feb 17th, 2026

Blue. That was the first thing I registered upon entering the exhibition. Not a cool or passive blue, but one that is present and profoundly unsettled. Across 26 works comprising 14 oil paintings and 12 works on paper from the last two years, Xiangni Song activates a spectrum of teal, cobalt, and ultramarine that never feels merely decorative. These blues are neither calm nor neutral; they are reservoirs of experience and raw feeling.

Song’s palette is a deliberate strategy, wielding emotional weight and tension rather than expressive flourish. Here, color becomes the primary language of a body of work shaped by movement of place, of self, and of attention. Each image is anchored in specific moments drawn from her lived field, such as weekday afternoons, apartment interiors, and shared tables. Sometimes she is witness, sometimes participant; but always, she remains the translator.

Xiangni Song, Incidentals. Exhibition view at Village One Art, New York City, 2026. Courtesy of the artists and VillageOneArt.

These paintings resist straightforward legibility yet conduct a forcing narrative. More than mere representation, they enact a subtle displacement, a drifting between the real and the remembered. Song challenges our habitual ways of seeing by withholding the stable horizon and the readable face. Figures appear fleet rather than resolved, and distinct expressions rarely settle into clarity. Backgrounds slip between discernible settings including a restaurant corner, a mahjong table, and a girl’s room, and pure color fields that refuse the constraints of time and place. The effect invites a slow entering: not an explanation, but an atmosphere.

Xiangni Song, Bury A Friend, 2025, oil on canvas, 32 x 24 inches. Installation view at Village One Art, New York City, 2026. Courtesy of the artists and VillageOneArt.

Such suspension becomes perceptible as a field of tension in Song’s work. Song often draws into the complexity of her dynamic personalities. In Coffee Break (2024), two young women sit closely, facing one another in an intimate but undefined void. Their bodies are simplified and distorted, while a cool palette of mint green, powder blue, and muted yellow draws the eye to relational space rather than physical detail. The figure on the left, quiet and understated, seems to recede; meanwhile, the figure on the right, more performative in gesture and dress, asserts a firm presence. Neither dominates.

The background dissolves into pure atmosphere, lacking both horizon and ground, forcing figures to float in a psychological interior. Their faces are near but not touching. Their gazes are calm, not declarative, and the eye contact feels charged yet restrained. A subtle line between their mouths becomes a fulcrum where connection is a fragile gesture, almost surgical in its precision. Small objects like the cup and vessel feel symbolic, as if holding emotional residue rather than liquid. A blue cat stands behind the right figure, its body dissolving into her silhouette as a companion and a witness, quietly anchoring the scene within Song’s cool, introspective mood. The work’s compositional symmetry is in motion: perfectly still, yet perpetually unsettled. Soft gradients and the absence of hard shadows lend the painting dreamlike. This is not a story resolved, but an experience felt.

Xiangni Song, Coffee Break, 2024, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. Installation view at Village One Art, New York City, 2026. Courtesy of the artists and VillageOneArt.

Song’s practice unfolds with a clear, rhythmic discipline. Work begins as paper-sized drawings before migrating to larger surfaces through a series of iterative revisions. She revisits her paintings, layering time and memory into existing structures. In FOUR (2024), four figures circle a mahjong table, extending the logic of her earlier work Upsen (2023). While the addition of a fourth participant is subtle, it expands the geometry of exchange and relation that animates Song’s ongoing inquiry. These gestures of creation, return, and reframing mirror the mutable contours of relationship itself.

Xiangni Song, Four, 2024, oil on canvas, 72 x 48 inches. Installation view at Village One Art, New York City, 2026. Courtesy of the artists and VillageOneArt.

Born in Beijing and living in New York since 2016, Song’s work can be read through various vectors of cultural translation, linguistic shifts, and psycho-social permutation. However, this body of work turns inward, calibrating perception rather than announcing difference. There is no overt manifesto here. Instead, Song’s decision-making feels habitual, iterative, and deeply felt. The external influences on her practice are neither foregrounded nor subsumed; they are quietly assimilated. What remains is an emotional choreography: the way we look, slide into connection, and turn away, and the way shared space contains and resists narrative closure.

I share with Song a preoccupation with questions of translation and belonging, which are themes that deserve more rigorous discussion by our generation’s artists. Incidentals does not offer answers, nor does it seek to. What it offers is something subtler: an invitation to dwell in those ongoing moments when we sense ourselves in language, in color, and in relation.

Left: Xiangni Song, Dead Should Remain Dead, 2025, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches.
Right: Xiangni Song, Gift, 2023, oil on canvas, 30 x 30 inches.
Installation view at Village One Art, New York City, 2026. Courtesy of the artists and VillageOneArt.

Incidentals runs from Jan 29 – Feb 28, at VillageOneArt (150 W 25th St #403, New York, NY 10001)