Los Angeles, CA: Siqi Fan’s solo exhibition Back of House is currently on view at The Reef in Los Angeles through July 20. The exhibition brings painting, sculpture, and installation into a focused consideration of work that supports public life while often remaining outside dominant historical and cultural narratives.

Fan is a Los Angeles–based artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, video installation, performance, and photography. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited at Vox Populi; the Asian American Museum at Great Park; Palos Verdes Art Center; Canyon Country Community Center; and A60 Contemporary in Milan. Across these projects, Fan has addressed food culture, migration, labor, memory, and the social conditions embedded in everyday encounters.

The exhibition centers on a black-and-white painting of Tie Sing, a Chinese chef whose labor contributed to early Yosemite expeditions but whose presence remains largely absent from dominant accounts of American history. Fan places Sing at the center of the image, shifting attention toward a person whose work supported those expeditions while his role has received far less visibility within familiar histories of Yosemite and the American West.

The choice of monochrome painting is also personal. Fan began her formal art training in China, where she worked within an academic tradition shaped by socialist realism, Soviet painting, and Impressionism. Her early education included sustained study of still life, human anatomy, and plaster casts. She has recalled spending long hours on repeated drawing and painting exercises, an experience that was both demanding and formative.

The black-and-white assignments she once found most difficult became especially important to Back of House. They were also where Fan first began questioning the role of painting itself. Faced with the task of rendering images realistically in monochrome, she began asking why painting continued to matter when photography and silver gelatin prints could reproduce the visible world. That question led her to pick up a camera and later study photography in college.

More than a decade later, Fan has returned to painting from a different position. In a reflection written shortly before the exhibition opened, she described the studio as a source of silence amid everyday noise. The conditions that once felt restrictive have become a place of concentration and refuge, giving the exhibition’s social concerns a personal point of entry.

A series of hinged paintings depicting a caviar factory in Quzhou, China broadens the exhibition’s focus from historical memory to contemporary food production. The works trace the connections between food production, labor, luxury consumption, and the movement of capital across borders. By turning to caviar, a product often associated with exclusivity, Fan considers the systems of work and exchange that underlie its circulation.

The movement between the Tie Sing painting and the Quzhou factory works is central to the exhibition. One looks back at a Chinese chef whose role in early Yosemite expeditions has been overlooked; the other considers a contemporary site of food production connected to global luxury consumption. In both cases, Fan directs attention toward labor that supports larger cultural and economic systems while receiving limited recognition.

Fan’s return to painting connects the exhibition’s larger concerns to her own memories of discipline, repetition, and solitude in the studio. Back of House does not separate personal experience from historical research. It places them alongside one another, using painting and installation to consider how labor is represented, remembered, and overlooked. In connection with the exhibition, Fan and artist Zengjie Chai co-hosted a chocolate bingo night, bringing food and informal gathering into conversation with the exhibition’s interest in hospitality and shared social space.
In Back of House, Fan places historical research, food production, and her own return to painting in conversation with one another. The exhibition asks how labor enters collective memory, and what remains unseen when the work that sustains public life is left outside the frame.