Brook Hsu has folded a private letter into the fabric of her latest exhibition. The painter has shared the full text of a handwritten note she sent to Pauline and Ben of Heidi, the London gallery currently hosting her solo show Trout Fishing in America, and has displayed the letter itself interspersed among the paintings. The gesture, she explains, is about pace. Hsu made the choice instinctively, without a fixed agenda, and only later realised she wanted the act of reading to slow visitors down. At a moment when attention feels scarce, she argues, paintings deserve to be looked at for long stretches — their detail and storytelling open a space for deep thought. Dated from Dubois, Wyoming, on 19 July 2026, the letter moves between memoir and art history. Hsu writes of the Wyoming wind and her Oklahoma childhood, and of rereading Richard Brautigan during a difficult period, finding that his humour relieved a steady, nagging ache. She recalls a British lover nine years her senior from her late teens, who introduced her to books, music and films — including her first Brautigan — and traces her long fixation with Balthus's La Victime, a painting she first found horrifying as a teenager and has wrestled with ever since, from an early large-scale ink diptych to skeletal figures. The note doubles as a short critical essay. Hsu takes issue with Jean Clair's writing on La Victime, proposing the painting reads as a "non-traditional vanitas" in which still life merges with landscape through the figure's mirrored echo of Poussin's Narcissus — fusing impermanence, violence, desire, youth and fragility. She closes by saying that recent years of landscape painting and storytelling have been building toward one thing: finding a new language for love, treated not as a feeling but as an action. Trout Fishing in America continues at Heidi, London, until 7 November 2026.