Pushing Open the Door of Yesterday: Xiangjie Rebecca Wu at LATITUDE Gallery

Installation view: A Room Rehearses Its Own,  LATITUDE Gallery, Photo courtesy of LATITUDE Gallery

By RUICHAO JIANG April 9th, 2026

No one can push open the door in their childhood.

This instinctive thought came to me upon entering A Room Rehearses Its Own, Xiangjie Rebecca Wu’s solo exhibition at LATITUDE Gallery. As I walked up the stairs into the gallery, what first drew my attention was a painting on the left wall: an open palm, turned upward, holding several marbles. They rest quietly in the hand, as if being offered toward me. The marbles feel familiar, drawn from childhood memory, but within the image, they carry a slight haze, something both known and estranged, as though filtered through recollection itself.

This sensation seems to echo the lines from Louise Glück’s This Is the House, quoted on the opposite wall:

 I remember my childhood as a long wish to be elsewhere.
This is the house;
this must be the childhood I had in mind.

Not to reenter, not to recover. No one can truly return to childhood, just as no one can truly push open that door.

Installation view: A Room Rehearses Its Own,  LATITUDE Gallery, Photo courtesy of LATITUDE Gallery

Curated by Xiaojing Zhu, the exhibition unfolds within a staged environment that subtly resembles a domestic interior. A painting of a pair of shoes sits low by a vintage chair. A mirror hangs quietly above a wooden table. At the far end of the gallery, a large painting captures light entering from beyond the frame, as though a door outside the image has just been opened. The boundary between image and space begins to loosen. The objects in the paintings seem to extend into the gallery, as if they were already there. A stillness settles across the room.

This stillness is not emptiness but structure. Wu’s compositions frequently hinge on the geometry of cabinets, shelves, and their shadows, with horizontal and vertical divisions folding into one another to create angled planes of quiet order. Everyday objects are placed within these structures as part of the space itself. They seem to have always been there, absorbed into the architecture of the room. This gives the works a quiet pull, inviting the viewer to linger on these images.

Installation view: A Room Rehearses Its Own,  LATITUDE Gallery, Photo courtesy of LATITUDE Gallery

Wu’s interior series are rooted in her childhood memories of rural China in the early 2000s. Old clocks, armchairs, open wooden cabinets with folded clothing, and painted plaster walls carry a sensory specificity so vivid that one can almost detect the smell of aged wood, limewashed surfaces, and even the faint trace of camphor.

Having grown up in a rural area in southern China myself, these images feel softly familiar, yet subtly displaced from the scenes I remember. I recognize the settings and arrangements, the atmosphere of childhood, but they appear in a different tone, as if held at a slight remove, with a dreamlike quality. The objects seem to carry gently diffused contours, as though their edges were lightly frosted. And yet they remain clear. One can still discern their outlines, their presence. They resemble the kind of images that surface deep within a dream: you know what they are, you know they are there, yet you cannot fully grasp their contours. This coexistence of blur and clarity reveals something essential in Wu’s painterly language, in her handling of brushwork and surface. It also points to her method and her concerns.

Installation view: A Room Rehearses Its Own,  LATITUDE Gallery, Photo courtesy of LATITUDE Gallery

Wu's paintings reveal a reciprocal relationship between subjective memory and the scenes from which it originates. The past, the remembered, and the spatial are all irretrievable in their original form. Wu does not attempt restoration. Instead, she constructs a density of memory, a space in which recollection regains weight and coherence. Oil painting here is no longer only a medium of depiction, but one of transmission. Entering this carefully calibrated space, the viewer becomes implicated in its process. Together with the artist, one approaches the threshold, attempting, however impossibly, to push open the door of yesterday.

Xiangjie Rebecca Wu: A Room Rehearses Its Own, curated by Xiaojing Zhu, is on view at the LATITUDE Gallery, 5 Lispenard St, New York, March 18 - April 26, 2026