XELA, “Corner of My Eye,” Long Beach, US 2024 Lou challenges the propensities of classical oil painting with decisions as subtle as a color palette shift and as radical as her choice of subject. With a rare deftness and sensitivity, her studied eye translates the legibilities of everyday life into something more muddy and opaque. One can’t help but feel a presence in her works, though they so often aim to estrange and to optimize absence. Lou’s formal powers lie in the redacted narrative. In her own words, “[my] artistic expression is the integration of hybrid cultures and languages, along with a deliberate disillusionment that challenges the prevailing optimism often associated with American culture.” Her subjects “transcend […] any singular purpose.” The artist sees herself not as a person animated by collective social perceptions so much as an avatar for approximate meaning, or an object hovering in “the periphery of awareness” — a mass of abstract constructions conjectured always by someone else. Lou’s gestures mimic the political act of remembering: she crops bodies and frames, zooms in on soft and curious details, and intricately, almost intimately, isolates and attends to public fixtures. The objects of Lou’s scrutiny are unflinching while simultaneously abject: they allude to certain failures of cultural assimilation and placemaking, meshing uncomfortably in a fog of submission and assertion. Each subject idles in a trick of light, dreamlike in its ability to unsettle, disorient, and misalign, and each has forfeited the possibility of achieving full and autonomous representation. “There is no answer,” they seem to say. “In the end, we belong nowhere and to no one.”