Brook Hsu at Heidi

Heidi’s inaugural London exhibition, Trout Fishing in America, marks Brook Hsu’s first exhibition with the gallery and her first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom.

For this show, Hsu began with the first postcard she sent to her now fiancé, Leander: a tender note written on the back of a reproduction of Gustave Courbet’s 1873 painting, The Trout. The text reads:

New York, March 24, 2023

Dear Leander,

I had this fish postcard out this morning. Of course it dawned on me you would enjoy it.
Courbet is a fantastic painter. I hope to show you more of this work one day.
Maybe even in Zurich? I have family there and go as often as I can.

Yours truly,
Brook

Leander later responded with a passionate postcard from Wyoming, where they now live together.

The fish depicted on Courbet’s postcard reappears throughout the exhibition. Hsu reproduces and repeats it across several paintings, stretching it in some works. Elongated and reimagined, it is animated by gestures motivated by a desire to connect more intimately with the subject.

The exhibition’s title, Trout Fishing in America, references Richard Brautigan’s 1967 surrealist novella. A countercultural classic, Brautigan’s book uses the concept of trout fishing to reflect on a disappearing pastoral America. Rather than following a conventional narrative, it unfolds through a fragmented and humorous series of anecdotes set across the Pacific Northwest, San Francisco, and Idaho. Throughout the novel, "Trout Fishing in America" functions simultaneously as a book title, a character, a hotel, and an abstract state of mind. Like Hsu’s repeated trout, it becomes a mutable figure, one capable of carrying multiple meanings at once.