Shanshan Jiang’s brand new body of work After Water, Before Form, begins with a reversal. Rather than asking how an artist represents water, the exhibition asks how water responds to, interrupts, and rewrites the act of painting. In this work, water is not a passive subject to be depicted, but a force that touches paper, drags ink, dissolves edges, and leaves behind evidence of its own movement.
Shanshan has taken ink painting out of the studio and into direct contact with streams, humidity, sediment, gravity, and time. Paper is no longer merely a surface that carries an image, and ink is no longer a material entirely controlled by the artist’s hand. Placed within watery environments, papers are transformed through current, absorption, diffusion, sedimentation, and chance. The image emerges through negotiation: between the movement of water, the responsiveness of paper, the behaviour of ink, and the changing conditions of the environment.
These works do not attempt to depict what water looks like. Rather, they register what water does. The forms that appear – resembling riverbeds, mist, tidal marks, breath, constellations, or sediment – are not representations of natural landscape, but traces left after water has acted. Each surface becomes a record of contact: of pressure, drift, resistance, disappearance, and return.
Rooted in the tradition of Chinese ink painting, Shanshan’s practice also engages with contemporary ecological thought, material agency, and the limits of human-centred authorship. She does not treat water simply as a medium or metaphor. Instead, ink painting becomes a sensing interface: a site where the artist’s body, the fibres of paper, the fluidity of ink, the speed of water, and the unpredictability of the environment act upon one another.
The exhibition therefore does not present water as a single theme. It raises a question about painting itself: when water is able to alter the image, interrupt human control, and leave traces of its own movement on the surface, who – or what – can be understood as the author of the work?
We hope you can join us in the gallery on Saturday 12th September for the opening night of Shanshan’s show from 6 to 9pm. There will be an artist talk between 6-7pm, so please RSVP if you would like to attend.
Where: 11 James Morrison Street, Glasgow, G1 5PE.
When: Saturday 12th September from 6 to 9pm.
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