Let Be be Finale of Seem (2026-ongoing)
was created for Living_ROOM, a project initiated by Rainer Junghanns.
Within living_ROOM, participating artists are invited to explore their understanding of private space and to invite another artist into their living room.
For my contribution, I invited Lu Chao (Asprin) to collaborate with me through an ongoing correspondence. From this invitation, Let Be Be Finale of Seem began to take shape as my own artistic project, while the exchange between us continues to develop through our independent practices.
Explore living_ROOM
Let Be be Finale of Seem
2026–ongoing
Zixi Xia
in collaboration with Lu Chao (Asprin)
The Only Emperor Is the Emperor of Ice-Cream,
his project name taken from the following line of the same poem by Wallace Stevens.
I see a book of poetry lying open in a living room. It is Wallace Stevens's Harmonium. In The Emperor of Ice-Cream, one line reads, “Let be be finale of seem.” Almost a philosophical proposition. The next unexpectedly announces that the only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Two seemingly unrelated thoughts, belonging to the same poem.
On the page, they belong together. Taken out of it, each seems capable of another life. I wonder if images might do the same.
My photographs often begin with my own body, somewhere within a psychological environment I cannot entirely see. Yet the images continue beyond the moment they are made. I often work from within an image, living with it, returning to it, and allowing it to change. Photographs can be revisited, transformed, held, or carried into someone else's world.
I have always been fascinated by the way Lu Chao photographs.
There is something almost absurd about his relationship with the camera. He photographs constantly, following an impulse that seems to belong to the moment of pressing the shutter. Ordinary things become strangely unfamiliar in his photographs, yet they never entirely lose their ordinary existence. I have always found something rather wonderful in that.
Our relationships with photography are quite different. I became curious about what might happen if I interrupted his way of working, asking him to return to photographs he had already taken, to look again, choose something, and send it to me. At the same time, I would have to encounter images whose making I had no part in, without knowing what had first drawn him to them.
Perhaps I was posing a philosophical question. But I was not asking for a philosophical answer.
I invited an artist, not a particular body of work. What interests me is not only his photographs, but his way of being with photography, and what might happen when it encounters my own.
We attempt to mute ourselves and let our images speak. Photographs become our words, our sounds, perhaps our poetry. We send images, prints, objects, fragments of our own ways of seeing. Sometimes they are letters; sometimes they are not replies at all. What arrives may provoke another image, another gesture, or simply remain where it is.
There is something I love about this uncertainty. We may misunderstand each other. We may respond to entirely different things. We do not need to explain what we have made, or agree on what we see.
Each image has its own life, yet something changes when it encounters another. Just as two seemingly unrelated lines can inhabit the same poem, our photographs may find themselves together without having been made for one another.
Perhaps a living room begins this way. Not with walls, but with things coming and going, with images entering other images, with a conversation that does not need to be spoken.
The room is never quite the same after something enters.
And now, his images are here, too.