In the project 60 wrd/min art critic, writer Lori Waxman explores how art writing can serve an expanded field of artists—including those incarcerated, trying to gain visas, working to establish themselves professionally, or just wanting feedback for a secret hobby. For this iteration, Waxman reviewed work made by Xiaohan Jiang.
Xiaohan Jiang
Does Xiaohan Jiang dream of horses? Her paintings surely do. Wispy and sinuous, they pulse with potent colors and symbols, conjuring wondrous pastoral landscapes traversed by elegant four-legged equines. No riders on those backs. These aren’t scenes Jiang has encountered in Chicago, her home of the past few years, but rather imaginative returns to her childhood in northern China. Most recently on view in “Just Beyond the Sight,” a group show at Bonian Space in Beijing, were six new pictures that evoked visions both benign and malevolent: human shadows holding hands in a rain of fire, surrealistic abstractions with spiky halos and webbed connections, bright ecologies amid peripheral darkness. Jiang’s brushwork is washy and thin, as if rained on or windswept. The exception is when she sometimes experiments with collaged fabrics, attaching velvet to canvas, then cutting and draping it, as if pulling apart the curtains on daily life to show what lies beyond.
—Lori Waxman 2025-04-14 12:02 PM
Xiaohan Jiang
xiaohanjiang.com
