Jacqueline Qiu: Burying Flowers

CHART is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Jacqueline Qiu, who debuts a new body of tapestries and accompanying watercolors that reveal emotional landscapes shaped by a kaleidoscopic intake of lived experience. Created over the past four years, these woven works emerge through an intuitive process. Working on one piece at a time and without predetermined sketches, Qiu allows what she reads, researches, observes, and absorbs in her daily life to filter organically onto the loom, letting each work find its form through mutability rather than pre-mediation.

Qiu’s approach to weaving emphasizes transparency: how things are made, how labor is embedded in an object, and how the material itself holds a voice. Where the warp threads are painted—primed and tinted like a canvas—she builds luminous surfaces in which color mixes optically through varying fibers. The interplay of yarn thickness, sheen, and density determines how each piece catches light, shifting subtly throughout the day. Rather than exerting control, Qiu works in active dialogue with the material. Where painting offers precision, weaving demands acceptance; the final form carries every irreversible mark made along the way.

“My weaving practice is a record of passed time,” Qiu notes. “The works feel like relics or altar cloths for the material and immaterial, a form of burial rite in and of itself.” This conceptual framework also informs the exhibition title, Burying Flowers, which draws together references to the 18th-century novel Hongloumeng《红楼梦》(A Dream of Red Mansions) and the debated “flower burial” of the Neanderthal Shanidar IV, stories that similarly hover between ritual, interpretation, and shifting understandings of the past.

Across the exhibition, Qiu explores the temporal rhythms of transition and emotion. Works such as Transient, Lingering, and Still trace the psychological passage through early adulthood, capturing the lightness of beginnings and the intensity of new independence. Well and Shallow probe deeper interior states, from grief and uncertainty to the constricted ways one may access nature when living within the limits of urban space.

In Rot, Qiu challenges the confines of the grid by working off the loom entirely, allowing threads to expand, wander, and erupt beyond alignment. Chaotic and energetic, the tapestry appears both to cohere and to disintegrate, its fibers pulling apart and converging in unexpected ways. What seems to be decomposing is also giving rise to new form. The work underscores a recurring idea throughout the exhibition: that breaking down is essential for transformation, and that vulnerability in process is part of the life of the weave.

Qiu draws on the Chinese aesthetic concept of liubai 留白 (leave blankness), where negative space is charged rather than empty. The tapestries hold space for what is said and unsaid, for what remains suspended, lingering, or unresolved. An ongoing engagement with kesi 刻丝 (carved silk) traditions—historically used to emulate the tonal complexity of painting—also informs her approach to mark-making, color gradation, and the interplay between presence and absence.

Throughout Burying Flowers, the structure of each work carries the concept it engages. Qiu’s tapestries chart lived time through intuition and sustained attention, offering a view into how emotional landscapes take shape at the loom. By making each thread’s path visible, she foregrounds the labor and sensitivity that shape these works, opening a space for viewers to consider how experience is woven into material.