65A Charlotte Street_2025 < London_England >
西出阳关无故人 | At the Violet Hour is a collaboration between Singaporean-Malaysian textile artist Xuan Yeo and Singaporean-Chinese performance artist Lu Lei, who together unravel what it means to say goodbye: to a friend, to a space, to a self, or to home(s).
Derived from a Tang dynasty poem by Wang Wei, 西出阳关无故人 (xī chū yáng guān wú gù rén): “Once you pass west of Yangguan, no old friends remain,” this exhibition unfolds in silences and crossings, borders, and thresholds. T.S. Eliot writes of it as the moment "when the eyes and back / Turn upward from the desk." In this exhibition, the Violet Hour calls beyond its time, towards a threshold, explicating itself in the lines between warp and weft. In this way, textile and voice melt into an expression of intimacy.
Produced on a backstrap treadle loom modified from a Japanese SAORI loom, the process of building and constructing cloth is embedded into its making. The works and the equipment used are to a large extent completely hand-built from scratch with a specific focus on working with the natural qualities of the material, ie. raw linen and raw silk, in which weaving tension, gaps between warp & weft, dpi, width, length, and the selvedges are fully dependent on the way the yarns interact with each other and with the wood being used. This is done as part of a longer term research endeavour into recreating an oblique treadle loom that merges the intersections of ancestral weaving with contemporary concerns, as evocative of the intersections between Chinese divination and New Age spirituality, which influences the structure of the weave as well.
Beyond the corporeal, there is a certain vulnerability of artistic surrender indicated through the entrusting of each others' personal languages and gestures into the other's hands. In doing so, they offer the viewer a way of witnessing the complexities of connection: how it unravels, how it holds, how it changes form in the act of departure.
To walk west of Yangguan is to leave with no promise of return. 西出阳关无故人 | At the Violet Hour invites viewers to stand at the seam, to feel the weight of parting, and to trace the thin line between holding on and letting go.