Three people gather around a flame. One leans forward, the other two are still. The field on which they sit is split neatly in half, revealing tree roots reaching down into the endless earth. A flock of sheep graze and sleep under a midnight sky, unaware – or benevolently accepting – of the strange scene unfolding before them.

Comprising all new paintings by Beijing-based author, filmmaker, and painter Xi Jiu, A tiger in the clover garden is inspired by the magical realist stories within Bestiary, a short story collection by Argentinian author Julio Cortázar. First published in 1951, the stories are of a haunted Latin America, filled with chimera and creatures borne from a fractured social landscape. Struck by the parallels between Cortázar's fiction and China's own long standing surrealist traditions, Xi Jiu developed a collection of scenes as an homage to both.

These dreamlike paintings symbolise our collapsing worlds, ruptured by malaise and environmental devastation. Painted in miniature detail but held at an observable distance, the scenes are at once intimate and detached, with moments of intense, violent clarity: a burning fire outside a window, a knife reflecting the sliver of a girl’s face. The figures, consumed by their own thoughts and tasks, are emotionally isolated from the animals and plants that surround them. A vase of flowers appears ordinary, but an arrangement of fallen leaves hides a cryptic message. At the center of the exhibition space, a large vivarium grows, its living inhabitants the subjects of several of Xi Jiu's paintings. A remnant from a recent exhibition by Zheng Mahler, the installation points to the mysterious connections between the two artists, and engages the potential of overlapping entanglements, drawing the living plants, fungi, and creatures into a new story.

In Cortázar’s titular Bestiary, a tiger roams a large estate, always lurking but never seen. Instead of resolving this terrifying living situation, the residing family conducts regular checks of their surroundings to find the tiger and avoid that area. The title of this exhibition is taken from a line in the story in which the family, waiting to dine, is informed by a farmhand that the tiger has now moved to the clover garden. A prescient allegory for the monsters we cannot, or choose not to confront, Bestiary and Xi Jiu’s exhibition explores the alienation of our current human condition, rooted in our fraught relationships with other living creatures.