Xiaohan Jiang is a painter and poet based in Chicago. Born in Hebei, China, she moved to Suzhou at the age of nine. Her work investigates the intersection of painting and poetry, drawing from the pastoral landscapes of her childhood in Northern China. Through allegorical imagery, she constructs a spiritual realm where poetry becomes a vessel for transformation and where image and text continually transmute. Her practice engages themes of identity, redemption, and belonging, shaped by the tension between personal memory and cultural dualities.

Jiang received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022 and her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the same institution in 2025. She is now teaching at SAIC.

Her work has been exhibited across the United States and internationally, including Nguyen Wahed Gallery (New York), Washington Studio School Gallery, (Washington, DC), Bonian Space (Beijing), Riverside Art Center (Chicago), Unveil Gallery (Irvine), Patient Info Gallery (Chicago), Art Clvb (Detroit), and 4C Gallery (Los Angeles). In 2022, she presented her first solo exhibition, Lowland Delusion, at Août Gallery in Beirut, Lebanon.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

I was born and raised in Hebei Province, in Northern China. Much of my early childhood was spent in a rural village called Xinxiang, where I lived with my grandparents. That time remains deeply imprinted in my visual and emotional memory—the stillness of the fields, the shifting light, the slow rhythm of village life, and the quiet tension between people and land. Even before I had the language to describe it, I was absorbing the world through looking. I believe my artistic journey began not with making, but with seeing intensely, silently, and attentively.

As a teenager, I moved to Suzhou, and later to the United States, where I earned both my BFA and MFA in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While my academic training gave me tools and structure, my creative instincts have always been shaped by poetry, memory, and spiritual longing. I’m drawn to the question of how painting can hold experiences that are fragmented, quiet, or unspoken. How can color, texture, and gesture become emotional language?

My early works were grounded in a personal mythology; recurring symbols such as horses, birds, and gardens served as anchors for memory and meaning. Over time, these motifs have evolved, but they remain central to my vocabulary. I now primarily work in oil, often on small-scale surfaces, building up layered spaces that float between memory and imagination. I also often incorporate fragments of text or poetic phrasing into the painting process, allowing image and language to bleed into one another.

Looking back, my work has always emerged from in-between states—between countries, between languages, between the visible and the felt. That sense of liminality remains the foundation of my practice and the place where I feel most at home as an artist.

What is your creative process like? Do you follow a routine or work spontaneously?

My creative process lives somewhere between structure and intuition. I often begin with something small and personal—a memory, a symbol, a fragment of poetry, or even a specific feeling from a dream or conversation. I don’t usually start with a clear image in mind. Instead, I start with a sensation, a word, or a remembered texture, and let the painting evolve through layering and response.

Material plays a huge role in guiding the process. I work primarily in oil, and I’m very sensitive to the surface I’m working on—sometimes canvas, sometimes wood or fabric. I often stain, sand, or re-gesso my surfaces to build a tactile ground before painting begins. There’s a lot of quiet time in the studio: looking, erasing, adjusting. I build the image slowly, sometimes over weeks, allowing each layer to suggest the next. I write as I paint, and the two often inform each other. A line of a poem might shift the color palette, or a shape on the canvas might call for a sentence or title.

I do have rhythms. Mornings are usually for looking and note-taking; late afternoons and evenings are when I paint. But I don’t adhere to a rigid schedule. I trust the pauses. Sometimes, not painting is also part of painting. I see my process as an unfolding conversation—between image and memory, color and silence, body and spirit. It’s not linear, and it rarely feels finished. But that openness is exactly what I love about it.

Themes of identity, redemption, and belonging recur throughout your work. How are these concerns shaped by your experiences of cultural transition?

These themes are not just conceptual for me; they are lived. I was born in rural Northern China and spent much of my childhood with my grandparents in a quiet village in Hebei. That early life was rooted in slowness, distance, and an intimate connection to land and silence. At the same time, I moved frequently with my family when I was young. There were many homes I lived in only briefly—places that never fully became permanent. Because of this, belonging has always felt somewhat elusive to me. I have never felt that I completely belonged to a single place, and even today, when someone asks where I am from, the answer feels complicated.

Later, I moved to Suzhou, and eventually to the United States, where I had to navigate the complexities of a new language, a new culture, and a shifting sense of self. This transition between worlds—geographic, emotional, and spiritual—became central to my work. Painting became a way to process rupture and dislocation, but also to search for a space of belonging that isn’t tied to any one place or identity.

My curiosity about faith also emerges from this condition of in-betweenness. I often feel small within the scale of history and migration, and I am drawn to the idea that the spirit might find a form of belonging even when the body cannot. The idea of redemption in my work appears through symbols, birds, horses, and biblical references that suggest transformation and the possibility of spiritual coherence within fragmented narratives. I do not see redemption as resolution, but as an ongoing process of becoming whole through remembering and reimagining.

Living between cultures means living in translation, not only linguistically, but visually and emotionally. That in-between space, though often uncomfortable, is also fertile. It allows me to create from ambiguity and duality, where beauty and loss coexist. When I paint, I am not trying to define who I am, but to hold space for the contradictions that come with movement, longing, and the search for home. My work is, in many ways, a quiet map of that ongoing process.

When viewers encounter your paintings, what kind of experience do you hope the work invites?

I hope my paintings offer a quiet, intimate experience—like stepping into a vague but familiar dream or being reminded of a scene from a novel or a film. My work doesn’t aim to tell a clear story, but to invite pause, feeling, and projection.

I’m less concerned with whether viewers “understand” the work, and more interested in whether they are moved by it. For me, painting is a language of emotion, not explanation. Color, texture, and image act like a veil—partially revealing, partially hiding—allowing each viewer to see something of their own. If someone finds a moment of emotional connection in front of a painting, even briefly, then the work has already done what it needed to do.

What challenges have you faced as an artist, and how have you overcome them?

One of the ongoing challenges I’ve faced as an artist is navigating cultural transition, moving from rural Northern China to Suzhou and eventually to the United States. This shift was not only geographical, but also emotional and spiritual. Living between languages, systems of thought, and visual traditions often left me feeling fragmented or invisible, both inside and outside of the art world.

For a long time, I questioned whether my experiences had a place in contemporary painting, whether they could be expressed without being explained. I struggled with pressure to produce work that was easily legible or fit certain narratives of identity, especially as an international artist in the U.S. But over time, I’ve come to understand that the ambiguity I carry is not a weakness—it’s the soil of my practice.

Instead of trying to resolve the in-between, I’ve learned to create from it. My process embraces slowness, silence, and emotional layering. I paint to hold things that cannot be clearly said. In this way, painting became not just a form of expression, but a space of survival and self-translation.

Another challenge has been balancing vulnerability with visibility—learning how to show the work publicly while protecting the quiet, private places it comes from. I continue to navigate this tension, but I’ve come to trust that sharing from an honest, complex place allows for the deepest connection with others.

What projects are you currently working on, and what can we expect from you in the future?

I’m currently developing a new body of work titled Land of Returning Birds, which continues my exploration of memory, spirituality, and transformation through painting. This series reflects on the tension between decay and renewal—drawing visual metaphors from industrial remnants, landscapes, and forms found in nature. I’ve been experimenting with integrating dust, pigment, and found materials directly into the painting process, allowing the works to physically absorb the memory of place and time.

These small- and medium-scale paintings merge observation with imagination. The act of layering paint, erasing, washing, and rebuilding becomes a mirror for inner processes of remembering and healing. I’m also continuing to write during this time—brief poems or inscriptions often accompany the images, offering a parallel form of expression where language and image blur.

At the same time, I’m teaching undergraduate painting courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as part of a postgraduate teaching fellowship. In the classroom, I support students in both foundational technical training—such as stretching canvas, color mixing, still life, and figure painting—and in more open-ended, poetic forms of exploration. In parallel with my teaching, I currently have work on view at the Washington Studio School Gallery in Washington, DC, as part of the exhibition Why Paint? II. The exhibited painting, Shared Smoke, reflects my ongoing engagement with material process, atmosphere, and collective memory, and marks an active moment within my current studio practice. Looking ahead, I plan to continue exploring the intersections of personal history and landscape, and of material process and poetic language.

Text and photo courtesy of Xiaohan Jiang

Website: https://www.xiaohanjiang.com/
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