"Tender is the Night" is the inaugural exhibition of PTT Space Shanghai. Imagined as an intergenerational dialogue between Beijing-based artist Xie Qi and the late Modernist painter Shiy De-Jinn, this exhibition features recent works by Xie alongside a selection of portraits by Shiy. Together, these works probe how we might envision a marginal body politics of abjection, evoking philosopher Julia Kristeva’s theorisation of the abject as “something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object.”

Diverging from prior descriptions of Xie’s and Shiy’s oeuvres—which, in the former’s case, usually focus on the corporeality of desire through her figurations, and in the latter’s, on an almost ethnographic impulse to document folk and vernacular traditions, architecture, and Taiwanese landscapes—this exhibition instead locates a register of alterity and inarticulability that permeates both practices. It proposes Xie’s and Shiy’s works as studies of the mechanisms of becoming desirous rather than of specific desires, be they carnal or emotional.

For Xie, the optical and technical properties of translucency and indeterminacy serve as compositional strategies in her paintings, highlighting the affects of abjection and their corresponding gestures of unease, discomfort, and, at moments, disgust. In the works presented in this exhibition, truncated torsos and limbs rise from the painting surfaces with a physical awkwardness that suggests an almost perturbatory relationship between posture and gaze. Here, the regime of technical choreography found in traditions of figure drawing and portraiture is destabilised in Xie’s propositions in favour of an alternate form of intimacy contingent on mutual vulnerability between the representational subject and the image-maker. This brittle rapport brings into view the corpus as an unruly aesthetic object that questions and subverts attempts to project desire onto it. A textural haziness in Xie’s renderings further lends a diaphanous quality to the final images, underlining the guttural viscerality with which acts of seeing and wanting manifest and inform a minor politics of the queer and marginal body.

For Shiy, portraiture has long served as a counter-melody to his more publicly known and recognized contributions to both the emergence of Chinese modernism and the almost sentimental documentation of Taiwan’s changing environments as postwar industrialisation incommensurably altered its landscapes and cityscapes. A purveyor of yearnings that have only relatively recently come under curatorial and historiographical attention, Shiy, through his portraits, particularly those of lithe, doe-eyed young men, locates a particular tenderness in the bodies and desires of an era in which heteronormativity was enforced through varying degrees of policing and social violence. Across many of his paintings featured in this exhibition, the subjects appear as much as youths Shiy encountered and engaged with as they do as mirrors of the artist’s self-image as a young man.

"Tender is the Night" takes its title from both the eponymous novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and the original line in the 1819 poem "Ode to a Nightingale" by English poet John Keats. The former is a tragic study of the ennui and inveterate desires of the last years of the Roaring Twenties, while the latter ruminates on the nature of transience and mortality. In both cases, the texts were composed at a moment when their respective writers were struggling with a crisis of pragmatic existence—a dilemma between need and want, obligation and desire. This tension similarly animates the central inquiry of the exhibition, which asks: what does it mean to want more than there is to take?

"Tender is the Night" is organised and presented by PTT Space as part of a research-driven programme cycle that situates contemporary practices in conversation with the complex legacies of Modernism in Sinophone art histories. The first exhibition in this series, Graphic Notations, which featured works by Shanghai-based painter Wang Yi and the late Richard Lin Show Yu, was presented at PTT Space Taipei in March 2026.

About the Artists

Xie Qi (b. 1974, Chongqing) is an artist based in Beijing. Her work has been exhibited extensively in China and internationally. Recent and past solo exhibitions include presentations at Perrotin’s Hong Kong and Shanghai spaces (2023, 2025, 2026), Nan Shan Foundation (Xi’an, 2023), Galerie Urs Meile (Beijing and Lucerne, 2021), and BANK Gallery (Shanghai, 2019). Her work has also featured in group exhibitions at the National Art Museum of China (Beijing, 2026), M+ (Hong Kong, 2025), Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart, 2019), Kunstmuseum Bern (Bern, 2016), Today Art Museum (Beijing, 2016), the Russian Museum of Ethnography (St. Petersburg, 2016), the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (Stockholm, 2013), Minsheng Art Museum (Shanghai, 2012), and Palazzo Reale (Milan, 2010). Her works are held in the collections of the Uli Sigg Contemporary Art Collection Foundation, M+, DSL Collection, Marlene Dietrich Collection, and Porsche Collection Foundation.

Shiy De-Jinn (b. 1923, Sichuan; d.1981, Taichung) was a painter widely regarded as one of the pioneers of modern art in Taiwan. After graduating from the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou (now the China Academy of Art) in 1948, he left mainland China for Taiwan, seeking to escape the ongoing Chinese Civil War and, apocryphally, an arranged marriage. After several years teaching in public schools, he resumed his artistic practice in 1952 and later participated in artist residencies in the United States and France. He returned to Taiwan in 1966, where he lived and worked until his death from pancreatic cancer in 1981.