Nan Ke Gallery is pleased to present Nights at the Circus, a solo exhibition by Lingrou Xie. The exhibition takes its title from Angela Carter’s magical realist novel of the same name. To some extent, the novel overturns the archetypal images through which women have been shaped and represented throughout history. In Carter’s writing, its protagonist, Fevvers, emerges as a vividly alive female presence—almost as if she were taking hold of the author’s pen to write herself into being.
Lingrou Xie
Embers, 2026
Oil on canvas
60h x 50w x 3.6d cm
© Courtesy of the artist
The story takes place in 1899, as the old century draws to a close.
A woman who claims to have been born with an enormous pair of wings has become a spectacle that all of London clamours to see. She is an aerialist: enormous in stature, flamboyant, vulgar, and loud. She drinks champagne, laughs uproariously, takes up space, and never attempts to make herself smaller in order to become the kind of woman the world expects her to be. Most importantly, no one knows whether her wings are real.
Lingrou Xie
A slightly sidelong gaze , 2026
Oil on canvas
140h x 105w x 3.8d cm
© Courtesy of the artist
And so, a line of publicity follows her performances across Europe:
“Is she fact or is she fiction?”
A young American journalist arrives in London determined to unravel the mystery. To him, this woman may be nothing more than an elaborate fraud. He scrutinises her body, questions her about her past, searches for cracks in her story, and attempts, through a rational and almost detective-like process, to determine exactly what the woman before him is. The novel thus begins with an extraordinarily familiar structure: a man looking at a woman.
Lingrou Xie
Mauve Haze , 2026
Oil on canvas mounted on panel
20h x 30w x 4d cm
© Courtesy of the artist
Yet as the interview unfolds, things begin to stray from the journalist’s expectations. The woman does not become more transparent under his questioning; instead, she grows increasingly difficult to discern. She tells and retells her past, reshaping it in the very act of narration. Gradually, the boundary of fact begins to blur. We can no longer be certain whether the woman before us is someone waiting to be uncovered, or a myth of her own making. Perhaps the real question was never whether she has wings.
But rather—why are we so desperate to determine what a woman is?
The same question lies quietly beneath the paintings of Lingrou Xie. The women in her works rarely reveal themselves in full. Their figures recede into plants, light, and layers of superimposed imagery. Most are drawn from cinema, literature, or pre-existing memories and narratives; they have already existed as images, already been looked at and defined.
Lingrou Xie
Tide , 2026
Oil on canvas
90h x 120w x 3.6d cm
© Courtesy of the artist
Lingrou Xie continually searches through these forms of visual culture for images of women, allowing faces from the past to enter the present and acquire other possibilities through the act of being seen anew. Looking at the female portraits in her paintings, one cannot help but wonder: Who are they? Someone who once existed? A character from a film? A memory belonging to the artist? Or some collective imagining of what we call “woman”?
Installation view of Night at the Circus, Sept.20, 2026 - Nov.1, 2026, Nan Ke Gallery, Shanghai © Courtesy of Nan Ke Gallery
When the exhibition space itself is transformed into a temporary “circus tent” from the novel, it offers another metaphor through which to encounter Lingrou Xie’s paintings. The circus is, by nature, a space built along the border between reality and illusion—real people assume fictional identities; the audience knows that what it is witnessing is a performance, and yet, for a moment, willingly believes in what unfolds before its eyes.
There is a parallel here with the ways female characters have been fashioned in literature and cinema: their images are created through fiction, only to return as paradigms through which women in reality are understood and defined. When Fevvers, in all her outrageous excess, creates for herself an image of womanhood that could scarcely have existed in her time, this relationship—of being shaped, and then constrained by what has shaped her—finally begins to loosen.
Lingrou Xie
Among Leaves, 2026
Oil on canvas
30h x 20w x 4d cm
© Courtesy of the artist
Nights at the Circus and the paintings of Lingrou Xie thus converge upon a question that has been repeatedly reconfigured throughout the histories of art and literature: If female characters have long been looked at, described, and imagined, can women in turn make use of these existing fantasies to reinvent themselves?
Yet the novel does not answer this question by “unmasking Fevvers,” just as the paintings of Lingrou Xie never attempt to provide such an answer for the women they depict. These faces remain suspended between memory and fiction, between the stories of others and the imagination of the self. The viewer may, of course, continue to ask where they came from and who they really are, but may never reach the “real woman” supposedly hidden behind the image.
Lingrou Xie
Returning like a slow tide, 2026
Oil on canvas
22h x 29w x 2.5dcm x 2 (unframed)
45.5h x 30w x 3dcm(framed)
© Courtesy of the artist
At the end of the novel, the two protagonists meet again. Following a train wreck in Siberia, the journalist loses his memory, and with it the coolly rational identity he possessed at the beginning of the novel—the journalist who had treated Fevvers as an object of investigation. He later lives among shamans and undergoes something approaching a rebirth. By the time he encounters Fevvers again, he is no longer the man who insists upon proving whether she is “fact or fiction.”
The journalist begins to “interview” Fevvers once more. But this time, his questions have shifted from Are you real or are you fiction? to: What is your name? Do you have a soul? Can you love? Fevvers is delighted. To her, this is finally the right way to begin an interview.
And there, the story abruptly ends.
In doing so, the line that opened the novel acquires another meaning:
“Is she fact or is she fiction?”
Text by Otto Neu
