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.

Artist Statement

Burying Flowers

葬花 zànghuā translates to bury flowers. 葬 zàng's components are organized from top to bottom, as grass 艹, death 死, and two hands 廾. I understand this character pictorially as the first person perspective of a burial. My hands at the bottom edge of sight, the dead material central, and grass coming from above covering it with soil.

The show title conflates a famous scene from the 18th-century novel 《红楼梦》 Hongloumeng, where a character gathers fallen petals in a silk pouch to bury them in the ground, and the Shanidar IV “flower burial” in northern Iraq. In the 1960s, when archaeologist Ralph Solecki discovered clumps of pollen underneath a Neanderthal adult male skeleton, researchers surmised he had been buried atop a bed of flowers.

The Neanderthal flower burial has since been reevaluated. The modern hypothesis is that nesting solitary bees and other animals carried pollen from nearby flowers—perhaps new life feasted on the meat. In my mind, the initial theory, the misunderstanding, and the updated explanation all effuse their own beauty.

My weaving practice is a record of time, and if I prescribe to a linear sense of time, it is of passed time. The works are relics, they are altar cloths for the immaterial and material alike, and a form of burial rite in and of itself. The warp is (by the standards of industrial weaving or weaving for practical use) thoroughly disrespected. Its structure asks for repetition, pattern, and consistency, but I cinch edges, leave space while building surfaces, and let threads hang loose. I am wary of finishing the work, even though it is preordained by the length of cut thread and the size of the weaving loom. Each weaving is a tactilely encoded document over months time, a conversation between control and play. The watercolors follow a similar philosophy, but are embodied in a temporality where time without labor lets pigment settle and dry on paper fiber.

            One day, about the middle of the third month, carrying a copy of The Western Chamber he strolled after breakfast across the bridge above Seeping Fragrance Lock. There he sat down on a rock to read under a blossoming peach-tree. He had just reached the line

Red petals fall in drifts

when a gust of wind blew down such a shower of petals that he and his book were covered with them and the ground nearby was carpeted with red. Afraid to trample on the flowers if he shook them off, Pao-yu gathered them into the skirt of his gown and carried them to the water's edge where he shook them into the brook. They floated and circled there for a while, then drifted down the River of Seeping Fragrance.

            Going back, he found the ground still strewn with blossoms and was wondering how to dispose of these when a voice behind him asked:

            "What are you doing here?"

            He turned and saw Tai-yu, a hoe over one shoulder, a gauze bag hanging from the hoe, and a broom in her hand.

            "You're just in time to sweep up these petals and throw them into the water,” cried Pao-yu. "I’ve just thrown in a pile."

            "Not into the water," objected Tai-yu. "It may be clean here, but once it flows out of these grounds people empty all sorts of dirt and filth into it. The flowers would still be spoiled. I've a grave for flowers in that corner over there. I'm sweeping them up and putting them in this silk bag to bury them there. In time they'll turn back into soil. Wouldn't that be cleaner?"

            Pao-yu was delighted by this idea.

From the characters’ interaction in this scene, I understand flowers as an analogue for transitory attachments. Tai-yu’s ritual is a metaphor and a wish to give illusory, worldly experiences a sanitized and fair mourning. Fortunately or not, I have yet sometime to be enlightened… so I gather petals and see how they’ll change.

Without the grass radical, 化 huà is a verb meaning

            1 change; turn; transform

                        2 convert; influence

                                    3 melt; dissolve

                                                4 digest

                                                            5 burn up

                                                                        6 die

                                                                                    7 [as a verb suffix] -ize; -ify

All this is contained in a flower 花 huā.