Lark_Spur: The Cabinet of Hers by Shengjie Jiang
by April Liu
Installation View of The Cabinet of Hers. Courtesy of the artist and the Cub_ism_ Artspace.
From late spring to late summer, beautiful larkspurs spread across temperate and cultivated landscapes. Split the name apart: the lark is spurring upward to the sky, while the rhizome remains deeply rooted in the land. This becomes almost a small allegory for Shengjie Jiang’s life. Born in 1999, the young artist has lived among Anhui, Pennsylvania, New York, and Chicago. The lark flies across continents, through the skies of two vast countries. The rhizome, fragile and powerful, keeps connecting her to land, to home, to the small ground beneath memory. In her works, the place of landing is never a broad concept. It falls on daily objects, on the cabinet, on the plate, on the spoon, on things small enough to be held, and heavy enough to carry a life.
Shengjie Jiang, Cabinet of Delphinium Days, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Painted in a quiet yet radiant palette, Jiang’s works shape scenes that seem only half available to sight. One may sense a girl at different ages, looking at a cake already cut, staring at a spoon with butter, or pausing before a cabinet whose doors are almost closed. She is perhaps distracted by something in the air. No one can tell what she is thinking. Her thoughts are somewhere else, slightly off-site, while memory and nuanced emotion remain here, quietly settled on the surface. They touch the audience’s nerves and let us fall into a soft sadness, into a tender distractedness. At the same time, the horses running through the image, the black cat appearing on the dessert plate, and the glaze on the sweet surface seem to say, almost gently: “I am fine, and all is fine.”
Installation View of The Cabinet of Hers. Courtesy of the artist and the Cub_ism_ Artspace.
The lark keeps spurring and flying around the continents. The larkspur lives close to the ground, among landscapes that may be cultivated, disturbed, or quietly left alone. Its bright color becomes a form of testimony. In Jiang’s paintings, sweetness is never innocent. It carries the bitterness of reconstructing home, leaving home, and floating through the image. The cakes, pots, cabinets, animals, and small domestic things are gathered like fragments inside a private container. They are soft, luminous, and slightly wounded. They hold the feeling of wanting to return to something that time has already changed.
Shengjie Jiang, Pot, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
In the artist’s own words, she is trying to make “the bitterest ice cream in the world.” Even after the bitterest scoop melts into the heart, it remains a scoop of ice-cream, far from the full bitterness of melancholy. This is where Jiang’s paintings linger: in the distance between dessert and sorrow, between the beautiful surface and the ache inside it. The soft and bitter sweetness of her work is embedded in the act of leaving home and rebuilding it again, one small object at a time. Everything finally becomes a bite of the bitterest ice cream in the world.
Shengjie Jiang’s debut solo exhibition: The Cabinet of Hers at Cub_ism_ Artspace in Shanghai, on view through April 18— May 23, 2026
About the author:
April Liu is a curator, researcher, and arts administrator working across contemporary art, postcolonial theory, and institutional critique. She holds an MA in Global Arts and Cultures from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA in Cultural Management from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has worked at Christie’s, Pace Gallery, and major art institutions in China and the US. Her research focuses on how museums in East Asia negotiate identity, power, and postcolonial legacies. She lives and works between Providence and Hong Kong.