In Katherine Bradford’s painting Push Pull, 2019, a featureless, androgynous individual is held centrally in the frame by a number of roughly hewn limbs reaching from the left and the right of the canvas. They buttress the figure in an aggressive manner but, strangely, also support and even care for it. Is this “push pull,” or tug-of-war, between figure and ground a form of protection or a confrontation? Some of the other paintings in Bradford’s recent exhibition “Legs and Stripes,” such as Choice of Heads, 2019, and Leg Hold, 2019, ask the same question. The former, hewn in layers of bright

Oil painting is as foreign to the Chinese visual tradition as kung pao chicken is to Western cuisine. “A Gift Like Kung Pao Chicken,” the title of Xie Nanxing’s solo premiere in London, underscored the artist’s sense of how his work is acculturated in a global context. But perhaps instead of the exhibition being a gift, it’s more like a gift exchange.

At Thomas Dane Gallery’s No. 3 Duke Street space, in a room painted scallion green to add a new flavor to the conventional white cube, a number of paintings from Xie’s “Spices” series, 2016–17, previously exhibited at the UCCA Center for Contemporary