When I visited Maggie Jiang’s studio to interview her, she had carefully laid out snacks: two big oranges, some small yellow cookies, large red grapes and brown almonds. The snacks echoed the careful juxtaposition of colors in her paintings!
The Absence That Keeps Shape, Jiang’s second solo exhibition in partnership with J Rinehart Gallery in Seattle, is well worth seeing—but move fast, as it is only on view during the month of February. The exhibition “extends the artist’s long-standing inquiry into how color, geometry, and spatial rhythm converge to shape perceptual and emotional experience,” according to J Rinehart Gallery.
Jiang was born in Beijing and came to the United States for graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University in Management. She is a self-taught artist who brings together elements from both the East and West. As she explores the principles of Yin and Yang, she embeds the exploration in early modernist principles of Albers color interaction, De Stijl Bauhaus, and Art Concrete. But Jiang’s work is never cold and analytical. She embraces warm colors and changing relationships in her paintings as a metaphor for real emotional relationships.
Blink Twice, the first painting I looked at closely, was just over three feet long with a large blue square in the middle. To the left of the blue was an area of striped blue and black and to the right a deep orange that went around the blue square highlighted by a lighter orange. The title encapsulates the spirit of Maggie Jiang’s work: When you first look at the painting you think it’s geometric, but the longer you look, the more complicated it becomes, perceptually. The shapes suggest relationships.
We see order both contained and freed in Run and Run with its anchor in a deep rosy square. Above it is a pale blue shape and it is surrounded on two sides by orange and blue stripes. Darker orange stripes frame the shapes, but one part of the frame has descended down beyond the square, as though it is tired of the restraint.
Jiang refers to her method as a conversation with the painting. She starts with an idea of shape and color, and then a rhythm emerges. She describes it like a chess game: “I make a move, the painting makes a move.”
Tangram puzzles, a type of spatial-reasoning puzzle originating in China, are one starting point. These have seven flat, colored pieces that interlock. In Jiang’s paintings, she varies this as she multiplies the number of elements in her paintings, and introduces the circle as a component. As we see the elements multiply, the tension increases. Jiang mentioned that she is personally chaotic in her life, so we can see these paintings as stemming the ride of chaos as well as sameness. She is always learning; each painting is an answer that creates more questions.
Jiang’s previous exhibition was based on the I Ching, The Book of Changes, which is an ancient Chinese text based on the cosmos, paired with philosophical comments. Jiang uses the hexagrams of the I Ching as the basic structure of her paintings, but she varies them. The small paintings suggest a profound aspect of her thinking, of the positive and negative, the Yin and Yang , the female and male, the passive and the active. These dualities are present in all of her work.
In The Absence That Keeps Shape, her current exhibition, many of the works are more complex in color relationships and more playful in shape. For example, in Cambodia 2025 we see a wonderful diagonal line marking the striped area of the canvas and the green frame of the blue but the color of the wood comes through in the green stripe and it reflects as gold, so we can read this as a gate as a Cambodian gate: that may not be Jiang’s intention but it’s fun to imagine what these shapes can become. When I visited her, she was very open to anything I suggested.
Another provocative pair of works is Impossible Twin Part 1 and Part 2. I’ll just talk about Part 1. A great bulging blue shape like a pregnant body emerges on the left. Charging up the middle of this big shape is a horizontally-striped parallelogram. The small green square to the lower right seems to hang on to that parallelogram. These elements are indeed having a conversation!
My favorite work of the new pieces is Bring Me Back Into the Fold. Some titles describe positions, as in Left Side Up. Others give us advice such as Blink Twice that speaks to the slow looking that Jiang asks for in viewing her work. But Bring Me Back into The Fold is a command. Is it a command to the viewer, or to the shapes themselves? The pink, yellow, and orange shapes are still sitting on the surface, but they are often cut off or divided. I feel a tenuous balance, as though it is all about to fall apart. So who is “me” in the title? Is the artist asking the parts of the painting to become a single entity, more unified, or is she speaking to herself, or to us, to enter the painting ?.
Go and explore these paintings in slow time. You will be glad you did.
‘The Absence That Keeps Shape,’ J Rinehart Gallery 319 3rd Ave S, January 31 –February 25, 2026. Opening Reception First Thursday, February 5, 2026, 5-8pm. Conversation with the Artist Saturday February 21 at 1pm.
