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Group Lick

Xinan Helen Ran

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Tutu Gallery

April 25 - June 13, 2025

 

“A message. Between the portrait, which is my side, and the Memorial, which is the Other's, there is a message. The heads and tails of the message are linked…as I and the Other, each representing a side, keep turning the coin, we create with our own hands a fated cycle that we fall into.”

 

Mu Xin’s Windsor Cemetery Diary sets the tone: of an uncertain exchange between two strangers who never meet, speaking only through the flipping of a penny in an otherwise deserted graveyard.

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In Xinan Ran’s second solo exhibition with Tutu Gallery, the artist continues this dialogue—this turning—by acknowledging the syndicated gestures that tire out rigid infrastructure. Photographs and texts are printed, drawn, engraved, and polished onto materials salvaged from the urban landscape.

This new body of work is conceived from and derivative of the phenomenon lachryphagy: butterflies who sip crocodile tears; animals that seek salt and minerals scarce in the wild. 3 pieces of stained white residue thread through artworks and the gallery space itself. They were once 50-pound blocks of salt, licked down by over 70 ewes and lambs on a sheep farm in rural New Hampshire. A vintage mineral statue of a girl and a dog sits on the mantel. Based on the early 20th-century motif Can’t You Talk, it captures the girl’s innocent attempt to talk to her non-human companion. The dog’s legs, worn down by decades of contact, now hang by delicate threads of salt. 

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Alongside these manmade and sheep-licked sculptures are 6 altered brass push plates, 20 portraits of dog statues with polished snouts, and 10 documentations of “desire paths” collected from Reddit—informal trails eroded by human or animal passage.

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At the center of the room stands a collapsible bamboo structure draped in translucent veils, modeled after the ephemeral scaffoldings used to erect high-rises across East and South Asia. Each stake carries a polished copper penny, Lincoln’s profile facing up. 

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Together these land/markers, their surfaces altered by repeated contact across time and space, have been rubbed against, walked over, protected, and preserved—in a constant state of exposure. Our desire to be seen and known, and to see and know the world—to reach out, to trace with our palms the meandering grooves of a salt lick or a dog’s paw—resembles the instinct of a butterfly’s straw-tongue being drawn to tears. Whether by habit, necessity, or superstition, we, gentle herds of civilization, leave similar impressions across cultural boundaries. Our collective “licks” soften the monumental and give shape to a slow and communal memory.

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Special thanks to Julie Whitcomb of Blackeyed Susan Sheep Dairy

and chef Erik Johansen of MacDowell for their help acquiring the salt lick.

Thanks also to Tanya Zamirovskaya, Peter Shin, Kumjana Novakova,

and Ellis Ludwig-Leone for their generous ideas and suggestions.

 

 

Xinan Helen Ran (b. 1994. Inner Mongolia, China) creates scalable installations, searching for the point where trauma, nihilism, and humor converge. Ranked “Highbrow and Brilliant” by the New York Magazine Matrix, Xinan is a 2025 MacDowell Fellow, a 2024 More Art Commission Artist, a 2024 New York State Council on the Arts grant recipient and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Xinan is an art educator, an art administrator, and an aspiring set designer for new theaters. www.xinanran.work