O-1 Visas
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 but 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