Frieze Seoul 2025: Gu Xiaoping: Gracefully Futile Leo Gallery｜ Booth C13

Leo Gallery is pleased to present Gracefully Futile, a solo project by Gu Xiaoping at Frieze Seoul 2025, featuring his key series Ink Lines in Motion, Inspiration By Observation Of Forms, and MODERACY.

Active since the 1990s, Gu has been a vital presence in Chinese contemporary art, known for his provocative use of photography, installation, and performance to reflect on China's transformation. Since 2013, he has shifted toward abstract practices, repurposing the traditional carpentry tool Modou (墨斗) to create rhythmic, meditative works that merge painting with performance. His use of this tool—dipped in ink and snapped across canvas—produces layered, grid-like surfaces that oscillate between order and chaos, contemplation and labor.

This repetitive gesture, while seemingly futile, becomes a method of constructing visual and philosophical order. Gu's process bridges the artisanal and conceptual, using the discipline of repeated motion to confront aesthetic conventions and respond to modern anxieties with quiet intensity. As curator Jang-Uk Lee observes, Gu adopts the formal vocabulary of Western Art Informel while employing techniques deeply rooted in Eastern aesthetics. He is a rare figure who has consistently explored the essence of Eastern spirit and tradition, and can be regarded as a defining artist in the emergence of a distinctively Chinese neo-formalist abstraction.

Through Ink Lines in Motion, Inspiration By Observation Of Forms, and MODERACY, Gu offers more than abstraction—he enacts a daily, deliberate resistance to noise and disorder. What at first appears monotonous reveals, upon close inspection, a richly textured visual language grounded in endurance, introspection, and transformation. In this tension between grace and futility, viewers find a still, resonant power.