EXHIBITION
September 12 - October 3, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION + BOOK LAUNCH
Saturday, September 12, 2026, 6–9pm
Gallery 881 is pleased to present Half of love is still Love, a solo exhibition by Long Xi Vlessing, on view from September 12 to October 3, 2026.
Join us for the opening reception on Saturday, September 12, from 6–9pm. The evening will also mark the launch of Vlessing’s first published monograph, Half of love is still Love, published by healing time, an imprint of Hard Liver. Copies of the book will be available for purchase during the reception.
Gallery 881 is a free and accessible third space. All are welcome.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Where did you go, Happy Dragon? Are you hungry? Why are you crying? What will you do tomorrow?
Half of love is still Love is the fruit of Vlessing's return to his family village in Fujian, China, tracing grief, intimacy and love through photographs of the people and landscapes around him. Amidst the grave illness and eventual passing of a family patriarch, Chen Leming, the artist moved to capture fragile, sometimes funny, images made from heartbreak and necessity. Shifting between mountain country and the urban seaside, these images hold life and death in close proximity, acting as a conduit for Love's jumbled excess. In Chinese life, family is one’s foremost pillar of support. In Minnan death, family facilitates one’s journey to the afterworld in a show of grand ritual and piety. Thrust into a funerary ritual, photography becomes Vlessing’s own act of love and devotion.
This exhibition announces the artist's first foray into traditional, medium-format photocapture following previously experimental digital and analogue explorations. Adhering to a set of strict technical rules over months, the artist worked sans tripod, balancing the camera on shelves, boxes, low walls, beds, eaves and edges to evoke the perspective of household objects in and around the home. In living rooms, in streets and on footpaths, Vlessing introduces us to an emerging cast of soap characters occupying the space of contemporary Chinese life: Blue Mother, Blue Neighbour, The Blower, The Bodybuilder. The resulting images situate us squarely within Vlessing’s mounting world of visual storytelling, one where both family and strangers stand as equals before the camera as abrupt subjects in revelatory moments, where private life evolves organically into creative catalysts, and the eye wanders to find meaning in the quotidian: ordinary moments serve as symbols of transformation, anxiety, and shared human experience.
Vlessing's first published monograph of photography Half of love is still Love, in collaboration with the imprint healing time, will launch worldwide at the opening reception on September 12, 6-9pm.
BIO
Long Xi Vlessing (b. 2000) is an East Vancouver-born visual artist of Chinese-Dutch descent working across photography and film. His practice centres diaristic photography on exploring intimacy and the lived-in body, shared humanity and quotidian scenes as sites of personal and collective transformation. As a kid of the aughts, his playful, circadian process introduces and synthesises digital, medium-format and phone cameras into the documentary tradition. He realises mixed-media documents and installations akin to diaries, implicating himself as narrator and marker of time.
Care, communion and criticality inform Vlessing's practice as much as his curiosity. He is a self-taught photographer and a graduate of Concordia University in Montréal, Québec (BA Communication Studies), where he studied film production, critical theory and the moving image, finding influence in narrative cinema, the Frankfurt School, West Coast Photoconcept and domestic objects. In Montréal, Vlessing is a frequent documentarian of queer nightlife and occupant of the dancefloor. Like 'slow dance' and ‘slow cinema', he embraces a relational, protracted and progressive process of image building in conscious opposition to the growing scope of automatized imagery.
Vlessing has exhibited across Canada, the United States, and China. He recently exhibited in Toronto at Gallery 44 as part of the 32nd edition of Proof, their annual survey of current concerns among the emerging photographic vanguard in Canada. He notably participated in the landmark exhibition Photos on Fridges at Harkawik in New York City, situating his amateur portraiture of a fleeting passerby within the history of his medium, magnetized to an ordinary household refrigerator alongside photographic masterworks. In Vancouver, his work has seen solo exhibition at Gallery Gachet and screening at The Polygon Gallery. He recently completed an artist residency at Céline Bureau in Montréal, where he performed and photographed an archive of sleep images, confronting our public secret of disconnection and loneliness within a larger social ecology of loss.
BOOK LAUNCH
Half of love is still Love, Long Xi Vlessing’s first published monograph and the debut title from healing time, will launch at Gallery 881 during the exhibition’s opening reception on September 12, from 6–9 PM. Visitors will be able to meet the artist and publisher and purchase copies of the book during the evening.
Where did you go, Happy Dragon? Are you hungry? Why are you crying? What will you do tomorrow?
Half of love is still Love is the first published monograph from photographer Long Xi Vlessing and the debut title from healing time, an imprint by Hard Liver. The fruit of Vlessing's return to his family village in Fujian traces grief, intimacy and love through fragile portraits of the people and landscapes around him. Amidst the grave illness and passing of a patriarch, Vlessing introduces an emerging cast of soap characters occupying the space of contemporary Chinese life: Blue Mother, Blue Neighbour, The Blower, The Bodybuilder. Shifting between mountain country and the urban seaside, these images hold life and death in close proximity, acting as a conduit for Love's jumbled excess.
Adhering to a set of strict technical rules over months, Vlessing photographed analogue and sans tripod, balancing his camera on shelves, boxes, low walls, beds, eaves and edges to evoke the perspective of domestic objects. The resulting images situate us squarely within the artist’s mounting world of visual storytelling, one where both family and strangers stand as equals before the camera as abrupt subjects in revelatory moments, where private life evolves organically into creative catalysts, and the eye wanders to find meaning in the quotidian: ordinary moments serve as symbols of transformation, grief, humour and shared humanity.
Opens with a foreword by Toronto-born writer and curator Temple Marucci-Campbell.
SPONSORS
Gallery 881 is proudly sponsored by our in-house PrintMaker Studio, a Canson-Infinity Certified Print Lab and custom picture framer dedicated to museum-quality production. When you print or frame with our sponsor, you help sustain Gallery 881’s free exhibitions, free artist talks, free and low-entry programming, and the charitable initiatives that keep our space accessible to artists and the wider community.