With adolescence comes a new sense of self which develops in that strange moment when we become hyperaware of our identity, as if our consciousness has split into performer and observer, and we feel everything twice: once in the moment, and once through the lens of our own introspective gaze. The teenage French poet Arthur Rimbaud captured this liminal state of mind that signals our first encounters with love, desire, and melancholy in an 1871 letter, writing: “For I is an Other. . . . I am present at this birth of my thought.” Such themes of connection and alienation permeate the works of Chinese-born artist Xingzi Gu, who translates these visceral experiences into a distinctive painterly language.