Leon Xu’s Distortions of Time

Leon Xu, a New York-based artist, specializes in work that explores the instability of what we remember. Gauzy and evocative, his paintings-of old cars, of flowers for sale outside a bodega, of a restaurant’s neon sign-feel like fleeting moments we were never supposed to commit to memory, the frame between frames, that tint of whatever. Xu’s work is less concerned with crystalizing the past and more with acknowledging how mutable reality can feel. Small wonder the 29-year-old has quietly become one of the most sought-after artists around.

On a Monday in April, I met up with him for lunch at a crowded Thai restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown, not far from his old studio. Xu was in an accident last year that left him a little hobbled, which made it physically harder for him to paint large-scale work—an impediment he isn’t letting deter him. He works mostly with acrylic and airbrush, and his forthcoming exhibition this year is loosely inspired by the Martin Scorsese dark comedy After Hours, about a paper-pushing yuppie experiencing a surreal night of inconveniences in 1980s New York City. “My takeaway from that movie is how little control you have over your life,” said Xu. “And then as soon as I figured that out, it made a lot of sense.”

In person, Xu speaks with an unhurried drawl, and his eyes seem to always be scanning the environment for abnormalities. That day he was wearing a vintage Armani Exchange sweater with an almost Victorian lacing system at the collar, and a black T-shirt, black baggy jeans, and black Comme des Garçons Foamposites. Dangling from his neck were two skinny chains: one with a small bulldog charm (his old roommate had a Frenchie) and the other of the letters SF, where he spent most of his childhood. “Growing up in the Bay definitely shaped me as a person,” said Xu. “I was skating, biking, doing graffiti.”
As a teenager, he and his motley crew of friends would hunt for ambitious spots to tag, which trained his eye to the city and all its finicky beauty. “Everywhere I went, I would just look around,” he said. Xu admired graffiti writers like Barry McGee (who would also go on to make a name for himself in the fine art world) and attended the Ruth Asawa San Francisco High School of Arts, a magnet school founded by the late sculpturist. It was there Xu was recruited to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in Philadelphia, which felt both like a big city and a small town, not unlike San Francisco.

After graduating, Xu got a job in Philly teaching art classes at a center for adults with learning disabilities that also helped them sell their work. “The nice thing is that it can be hard for them to get jobs, and a lot of them are so talented,” he said. “As I came to understand it, whatever [other skills] they lack, they are better at what they’re good at. And a lot of them are so good at art.” In 2019, a similar opportunity came up in New York, so Xu packed up and moved east with two months’ worth of savings, and not much else. Then, for reasons that were never made clear to him, the job offer was rescinded. He ended up having to take on multiple gigs just to pay his bills. “I worked at this clothing store, I was stretching a canvas for this white artist lady, and then I was working as an art handler,” Xu said. The pace of work was unrelenting, and he had little to show for it. “I didn’t paint at all,” he said.

Then in March 2020, the city shut down and his roommate moved back to the Bay. Alone, and with time suddenly distended, Xu began to paint.

I first came across Xu’s work a few years ago on Instagram, where he goes by @moderndayconfucious, and he seemed to know everyone that I knew. In an introductory text for Xu’s 2023 exhibition at Helena Anrather, the Pulitzer-winning writer Hua Hsu described his own fascination with the artist’s work: “The flowers are already dead, the light will never look the same as it did a few blocks ago. There are no lines or borders in Leon’s paintings, just these wondrous, meticulous blurs that come into focus from a distance, and the effect is realizing that you’re not looking at a painting about reality, but about memory.”
The solitude of the pandemic allowed Xu to paint every day, and his signature style emerged almost fully formed: refined, sophisticated, haunting. He’d post his work to Instagram, which pretty quickly attracted the right kind of attention—this led to exhibitions and galleries all over the world, from Art Basel to Frieze (and opportunities with everyone from Nike to Kiko Kostadinov to Hyundai’s Artlab).

Xu went from not painting at all, juggling multiple jobs in order to afford rent, to being an incredibly sought-after rising star, all in the span of a few months. “2023 was probably my most busy year for my art career,” he said. “I did two solo shows and that was a lot, and honestly, it kind of killed my creativity. But I’ve never had opportunities like that before.”

When Xu paints, he’ll start with a photo he took on his phone but leave it in his periphery. He avoids looking at the image as much as he can. “I’ll have it as an inspiration, and if I’m feeling lost I’ll look,” he said. “But I try not to paint from photos because then I could just show the photo.” Instead, he tries to let his instincts take over, conjuring something out of the ether that is at once entirely new and may not have actually been there.

Xu’s background in graffiti—particiarly the urgency and risk associated with getting caught by police—still informs how he operates in the studio. “I still remember the adrenaline rush and the emotion of painting big things in a small amount of time, so I try to bring that energy,” he said. “A lot of times when I paint, I black out. I like letting my instincts take over because you can’t really train that. That’s when it’s the most pure.”

Like a lot of great artists, Xu happens to be a firm believer in the creative necessity of dicking around. Of purging the ego and allowing the mind to wander so the muses can materialize. “I definitely work a lot better off of deadlines,” Xu said. “If I’m in the studio for five hours, I’ll probably fuck around for three hours, and then I would work really hard for two hours.”

What does fucking around entail exactly? “I’ll doomscroll,” he admitted. “I look at some picture books. I watch a lot of random YouTube videos.” Currently, his YouTube algorithm is populated by assorted DJ mixes (“Better than Spotify”), tiny apartment solution channels like NeverTooSmall, and UFC highlights. (“Very, very artful,” he says of MMA. He’s particularly fond of the fighter Max Holloway.)

One of the reasons Xu finds his injured state a little frustrating is he can’t produce work as urgently as he used to. He was supposed to have a show in April but had to push, allow his body time to heal. “Honestly, how I feel about painting right now . . . It’s become a job. And that’s hard to accept sometimes,” he said.
Xu acknowledged that working at his relentless 2023 pace was not sustainable. Right now, he’s in a calibration phase: He’s applied to a few artist residencies here in the city, and he’s taking on smaller, less ambitious commercial projects that will allow him to pay the bills and free him up to make work he’s happy with. “I’m trying to do other stuff so that I can keep the painting more pure,” he said.

Like early lockdown, his reality right now feels a little odd. Things are happening that are beyond his control, but he’s learning to not fight the current: to notice opportunity even if it might sit beyond his immediate field of vision. “Now that I’m forced to be a little more chill, I might as well use this time to experiment a little,” Xu said. Time is once again dilated, and perhaps that’s a blessing.

Chris Gayomali is the deputy editor of SSENSE.