"Vortex Evolution," a current solo exhibition by Jiang Miao. This is an article written by the exhibition's curator, Zhang Chen.

Close up

Unlike our habitual understanding of the vortex as a spontaneous movement, for Jiang Miao the “vortex” forms a pictorial order and a means of transforming energy consciously constructed within her artistic practice. In Jiang Miao’s works, points, lines, layers of colour, and knife marks gather and rotate around invisible centres, then branch outward and evolve from within. These “vortices” may call to mind irises, tree rings, or ripples in water; at other times, they resemble the movement of celestial bodies, the division of cells, or geological sedimentation. The viewer’s gaze is thus drawn away from the surface of the image and toward the depths of the material, prompting us to discern the traces that time has left along the edge of the carving knife. Jiang Miao repeatedly covers wooden or aluminium panels with acrylic paint, then cuts through the surface of the paint with printmaking carving tools, allowing colours that had been sealed beneath to reappear. Within this process, covering and removal, destruction and revelation, repetition and difference become entangled across the pictorial surface, together forming the sequential relations and temporal structure of the work.

This exhibition brings together recent works from Jiang Miao’s Taoist Trinity and the Self, Heavenly Eyes, Mindfulness, Rebirth, and other series within the same space. They face one another, collide with one another, and enter into dialogue. Their juxtaposition reveals that these series are neither clearly separated categories nor a linear progression in which one replaces another. Rather, they are more like different layers of the same image of life, overlapping one another, continually differentiating, and continually returning. Vortex Evolution therefore concerns both a gaze directed at the present and a look back toward history; the origins of Jiang Miao’s recent works gradually become clear through this very process of evolution.

Recent Works

Exhibition View

In Jiang Miao’s works of recent years, the vortex is almost everywhere. As a natural image that has appeared repeatedly across civilizations in both East and West, the vortex in Jiang Miao’s work has shifted from a symbol awaiting interpretation into a verb of pictorial action. It appears in different guises—as a circle, spiral, eye, opening, ripple, or cell—and changes its scale, direction, and function in each work. It draws the gaze inward while dispersing energy outward; it maintains the integrity of the circle through its own rotation, yet is continually interrupted by geometric planes, blocks of colour, and proliferating textures. It is precisely through this repetition, displacement, and transformation that one series enters into another, while the related forms shared among the series jointly carry experiences of life and transformations of the spirit.

Exhibition View of Taoist Trinity and the Self series

Taoist Trinity and the Self is an important point of departure for understanding the “vortex” and Jiang Miao’s carved-acrylic works. In this series, the artist established a circular pictorial system: the circle both organises the composition within the image and directly becomes the framework and outer boundary of the work. As layers of colour are repeatedly covered, incised, cut open, and revealed again, the originally complete circle begins to take on a generative movement, turning the painting itself into a spiritual apparatus for the cycle of life. When the colours in the image are sealed time and again and then reopened by knife marks; when the incisions interrupt an already formed surface and initiate another round of revelation, then, from the perspective of time, we may say that these covered-over pasts have not disappeared from the image, but continue to act on a new level. This itself constitutes a visual “cycle of return.” Such a “return” does not mean going back to the point of origin, but points instead to a process of movement that continually produces difference within repetition. To borrow Nietzsche’s term, amid the vortex’s uninterrupted operation and interruption, and between the repeated action of the carving knife and the accumulation of layers of paint, this process takes the form of an “eternal recurrence.”

We can see that the circular movement of the vortex does not always proceed smoothly. In Jiang Miao’s work, the blocks and clusters of colour scattered across the pictorial space resemble the growth of moss, the proliferation of microbial colonies, or the sedimentation of minerals. They create obstructions within the movement of self-circulation, so that the circle is no longer merely an abstract, enclosed geometric form, but gathers, divides, and recombines together with the material. What is called the “origin” here is therefore not a static point of departure, but becomes a beginning oriented toward life, an allegory of death and rebirth.

Exhibition View of the Heavenly Eyes series

Heavenly Eyes developed out of Taoist Trinity and the Self. In this series, the circle remains, but the shape of an eye gradually emerges from within it. In this way, Heavenly Eyes gives the earlier schema of life cycles and concentrated energy a dimension of vision, turning an outward movement back into a form of spiritual introspection.

It is precisely between inside and outside, in the dissolution of the boundary between subject and object, and at the point where gazes meet, that the transformation of energy continues in stillness.

Heavenly Eyes is therefore neither a depiction nor a representation of the eye, nor an attempt to add a recognisable symbol within the circle. What it changes is the mode of viewing established by the original system of Taoist Trinity and the Self. Here, the “vortex” is no longer merely something passively viewed; it is itself looking, searching, and actively operating. Heavenly Eyes brings not only an infinite expansion of the scale of vision, but also a subtle shift in the position from which one looks: the human being no longer occupies a secure place outside the image of the cosmos, but becomes a minute component within it—watched, penetrated, and measured.

Exhibition View of the Water · Sphere series

When this gaze turns back upon itself, Mindfulness becomes possible. It transforms the mode of seeing established in Heavenly Eyes into an inward “awareness”, summoning the previously vast cosmic spirit back into consciousness, breath, and the interior of the body, while compressing the vortex’s continuous movement and time into an instant of “sudden enlightenment.” If Heavenly Eyes disperses the gaze across the world, Mindfulness asks the viewer to face the self again. The two do not constitute a step-by-step progression along a single path; rather, through the language of the circle, vortex, and colour layers established in Taoist Trinity and the Self, they radiate and expand in two different directions.

Jiang Miao “Rebirth 20260711” 2026, 130×160 cm, Acrylic on aluminum panel, carving

The Rebirth series may appear to occupy the endpoint of this process of evolution, yet it does not constitute the final link in a sequence or genealogy. For Jiang Miao, “rebirth” has in fact been a recurring proposition since the beginning of her practice, and it has long been latent within the self-operating structure of Taoist Trinity and the Self. The “rebirth” of Jiang Miao’s new works is therefore both a retrospective movement and something like a restart of the machine of “eternal recurrence”: it comes from an individual life looking back after passing through past events, from the convergence of each past memory in the present, and it also reveals the artist’s courage to set out again after passing a particular juncture in life or stage of artistic practice.

Exhibition View of the Water · Sphere series

If, after looking at the carved-acrylic series, we turn back to Jiang Miao’s oil paintings in Water · Sphere, we can understand how they provide another, earlier point of origin for the structures of life described above. On the oil-painted canvas, Jiang Miao still retains concrete images of mountains, water, and rocks, yet presents them as an “inner landscape” that penetrates the external landscape and is jointly formed by dreams, bodily memory, and the experience of life. Here, water is both a natural image and an immaterial medium that nurtures life; mountains and rocks place individual life within the greater depth of geological time and a cosmic scale. The artist describes this stage as a period in which life was “quietly gestating,” while the later series such as Taoist Trinity and the Self spiral outward from this state of gestation as forms endowed with lives of their own.

We can therefore see that Jiang Miao’s various series are closely joined like an organism rather than forming a linear path of development. The grammar of circles, rotation, temporal sedimentation, and the reorganisation of life constructed in Taoist Trinity and the Self acquires a dimension for viewing the world in Heavenly Eyes, turns back into the depths of consciousness in Mindfulness, and is reactivated and renewed in the Rebirth series. The earlier Water · Sphere, meanwhile, allows us to see how the cosmic structures in these carved works slowly emerged from water, mountains and rocks, dreams, and bodily memory. Across the changes and gaps between each series, the “vortex” remains a mechanism that sustains the artist’s practice: it draws bodies of water inward, makes life revolve around time, turns the gaze back and forth between the world and the self, and causes established orders to split apart once again so that new forms can break through.

Making

Close up

It should be noted that the pictorial force of Jiang Miao’s work is always intertwined with the process of its making.

Beneath the surface of each of her carved-acrylic works, more than twenty layers of colour are often compressed together. The seemingly repetitive processes of covering and carving also seal, layer by layer, the artist’s perceptions of life and emotion at different moments, and even of light and atmosphere. The concentric circles of the “vortex” are likewise not smooth and regular geometric outlines, but are formed by countless knife marks with rough edges, breaks, and differences in depth. These marks press against one another in local areas of each work, causing the grand order to be continually disturbed by the material at a microscopic level. Detail and whole, construction and destruction, together with every act of covering and waiting, chance and adjustment, jointly constitute the material entity of each work before us.

Exhibition View

In his book Making, anthropologist Tim Ingold expanded our understanding of the act of “making.” He argues against understanding artistic creation as the prior determination of a form that is then imposed upon passive material, placing greater emphasis instead on the continuous “negotiation” and “response” between maker, tools, and materials. In his view, whether East or West, primitive or modern, craft and artistic practices across different cultures all embody a process of “thinking through making.” We can see that when Jiang Miao drives the carving knife into the layers of colour, the colours that appear by chance, the resistance encountered by the blade, and subtle changes in local textures continually alter the artist’s judgment about what to do next. The hand must adjust angle and pressure; the body must maintain rhythm and breath; the eye repeatedly recalibrates between accidents of detail and the structure of the whole. Spirituality here does not hover outside materiality, but takes concrete form as a prolonged state of labour and a process carried out through the body. At a time when digital images can be generated, copied, and replaced instantly, this irreducible time of making—and the complex relations in which brain and hand, eye and heart, image and material draw close to one another and then separate again during production—brings the questions of contemporary art back once more to the beginnings of ancient civilisation, becoming another “cycle of origins” for art and history.

Printmaking

Exhibition View

Finally, Vortex Evolution also brings our understanding of Jiang Miao’s recent works back to the starting point of her early practice: her black-and-white woodcuts. In print works such as Girls, Believers, Hug and Mitogenetic series, concrete figures and intimate bodily sensations become entrances into the individual’s inner world. A more persistent thread running through them, however, is the artist’s organisation of points, lines, and planes, as well as the constant shifts between black and white, visible and concealed, solid form and absence. Woodcut requires an image to emerge through the act of removal; only the traces left by the carving knife can reveal the outline of the body and the volume created by light and shadow. Unlike oil painting and other media, in printmaking an image is not built up through application, depiction, and addition, but gradually comes into being through stripping away, reversal, selection, and irreversible decisions. This has continued as the internal logic and working method of Jiang Miao’s carved-acrylic practice.

From the early prints to the recent works of today, we see the figure gradually withdraw from the image, while the line continues to sustain its own movement. The dense lines that once shaped figures and space in the woodcuts seem to gain new vitality in more circuitous forms: in the circular trajectories of Heavenly Eyes, the channels of transmission in Mindfulness, the temporal gradations of Taoist Trinity and the Self, and the growth that penetrates darkness in Rebirth. The positive-negative relationship of black and white in printmaking is thereby transformed into shifting flashes of paint between surface and depth, concealment and revelation. Meanwhile, the “block,” which traditionally serves in printmaking as the intermediary for transfer, becomes the work itself in Jiang Miao’s practice: wooden and aluminium panels no longer retreat behind the image, and the carved marks, colours, and materials themselves become the direct objects of viewing. The multiple layers of acrylic colour seem to compress onto a single support, at a single moment, the colours that in multicolour printmaking would be distributed across separate printing stages. The carving knife then excavates them layer by layer, almost archaeologically. The “block” once used for reproductive printing thus speaks of its own irreproducible material nature.

Exhibition View

What Vortex Evolution allows us to see is precisely such an artistic trajectory: clear and self-aware, yet by no means smooth. Within it, Jiang Miao’s different series are not parallel illustrations of a number of grand concepts, but arise from the mutual stimulation of material and life, image and body, over a prolonged process of making.

Faced with Jiang Miao’s works, we may be drawn to their cosmic imagination, but we should also see the concrete knife marks, layers of colour, and the weight of labour. We may discuss the spirituality of the works, but we must also understand how such spirituality grows from the soil of materiality. The movement of the vortex does not remove vision from reality; rather, it brings the experiences of life, past and present, into conjunction on the same plane, allowing reality itself to wait to be discovered within the silent traces of the carving knife.

Text by Zhang Chen

JIANG MIAO: Vortex Evolution