ArtEchive

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. This conversation is organized by ArtEchive as part of our ongoing interview series.

We approach this discussion as a way to think through how memory, emotional residue, and everyday objects operate within contemporary painting practice. Rather than treating personal experience, material fragments, and atmosphere as separate dimensions, we are interested in how they overlap and quietly shape the emotional structure of images.

Today’s interview begins with your relationship to ordinary objects, such as cakes, cabinets, cups, and small animals, and moves toward broader questions of memory, migration, softness, and loss. We will also discuss the role of blur and instability in your visual language, the emotional complexity of leaving home, and how sweetness, humidity, and sensory recollection become ways of carrying emotions that are otherwise difficult to articulate.

THE QUIET LIFE OF OBJECTS AND EMOTIONAL RESIDUE

ArtEchive

Your work often includes very ordinary elements, like cakes, cabinets, tableware, and small animals, but in your paintings, they never feel like conventional still lifes. Instead, they seem more like traces left behind after emotions have passed through a space. Why do you keep returning to these small objects?

Shengjie Jiang

For me, it’s really both. On one side, it is definitely a visual strategy. When I’m making work, I consciously think about how to bring opposing elements together. I’m interested in how different forces can occupy the same space without resolving.

But at the same time, it comes from my personal experience. I’ve always felt that I have many contradictory qualities within myself, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that, especially in relation to identity. So the tension in my work isn’t just formal. It reflects how I experience the world, both internally and externally. It’s something psychological, but also something structural that I observe around me.

ArtEchive

You once wrote about “the most bitter spoonful of ice cream in the world.” I really love that metaphor because it feels both light and cruel at the same time. Why are you drawn to using “sweet” things to carry emotions that are otherwise difficult to articulate?

Shengjie Jiang

I don’t think sweetness necessarily represents happiness. Sometimes sweetness becomes bitter precisely when it becomes too intense, almost to the point where it’s difficult to swallow. For example, very rich dark chocolate ice cream. It’s sweet and soft at first, but once the cocoa becomes too overwhelming, it fills the entire mouth and turns into something almost cruel. I’m very drawn to that contradiction. It’s still ice cream and cream, but it can hold a kind of pain that cannot easily be spoken aloud.

At the same time, I don’t want bitterness to appear too directly in my work. Allowing sweet things to carry it makes the emotion softer and closer to how feelings actually exist in everyday life. Bitterness rarely arrives in a purely painful form. Very often, it hides itself inside beautiful, soft, and ordinary things.

BLUR, MEMORY, AND THE FEELING OF LEAVING

ArtEchive

Many of your images feel unstable rather than fixed or sharply defined. They resemble fading memories, or the fragmented and drifting sensations that emerge while trying to recall something. Is this sense of “unclearness” important to you?

Shengjie Jiang

Yes, it’s extremely important to me. I never want the image to function as a definitive record, because memory itself is unstable. Every time we remember something, certain details disappear, while imagination begins to fill in the gaps. For me, blur is not a form of absence. It’s actually the most truthful way memory exists.

ArtEchive

For many people, leaving home for the first time comes with a complicated and slightly bitter emotional experience. I’m curious whether this experience of “leaving home” has had a strong influence on your practice.

Shengjie Jiang

For me, leaving home initially felt like a very natural consequence of growing up and making choices. At the moment it happened, I didn’t experience an overwhelming sadness because my anticipation for the future outweighed the feeling of separation. It’s a little like an umbrella forgotten in the corner of a room after surviving a rainstorm. Only much later, when you suddenly smell the damp and mold lingering on it, do you remember the rain itself.

The bitterness of leaving home came much more slowly. It arrived through the realization that I could never completely return to the past again. Because of that irreversibility, I constantly find myself trying to hold onto things through repeated remembering, repeated searching, repeated sensing, the memory of a broken cup, a faded light, a touch that has gradually disappeared from memory. Painting becomes one way for me to keep those fragments from vanishing entirely.

RAIN, HUMIDITY, AND SENSORY MEMORY

ArtEchive

Besides painting itself, is there anything recently, a book, a memory, a smell, or even a certain emotional state, that has been continuously influencing your work?

Shengjie Jiang

Recently, I’ve been reading Rain by the Malaysian writer Huang Jinshu. Every time I open the book, the atmosphere of the South seems to rush out from its pages. Even the paper itself begins to feel humid and sticky.

At the same time, New York’s weather lately has been very unstable, with sudden rain showers appearing constantly. What I’m reading, imagining, and physically experiencing all seem filled with the smell of soil and moisture. While painting, I often find myself imagining the sensation of raindrops touching skin, or the scent of wet earth. Sometimes it feels as though a ladybug might land on my hand at any moment.

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