The Spiral as Teacher: What Jiang Miao's Carved Paintings Show Us About Focus
Look at a cross-section of a tree and you’ll see rings, a record of time laid down one season at a time. Look at a seashell, a hurricane, or a fern unfurling, and you’ll see a spiral, one of the oldest shapes in nature and in human art. Artist Jiang Miao builds both into the same object.
In his solo exhibition Spiral of Energy, on view in Seoul through August 23, Miao starts with a wood or aluminum panel and carves it into fine, ring-like textures before layering on vibrant acrylic paint. The result looks less like a painting than a cross-section of something alive: a tree trunk, an eye, a planet. Series titles like Heavenly Eyes, Mindfulness, and Taoist Trinity and the Self point to the idea behind the technique. Drawing on Eastern philosophy, Miao treats the spiral as a stand-in for time, cyclical order, and the structure of the universe, while color carries what he calls “invisible energy beyond the material world.”
There’s a useful lesson here about how symbols travel. The spiral shows up at Newgrange in Neolithic Ireland, on prehistoric pottery in Thailand, and in Taoist cosmology, not because these cultures copied each other, but because the shape is everywhere in the natural world they were observing. Art history is full of moments where wildly different traditions land on the same form independently, simply because nature got there first.
The other lesson is about process as meditation. Carving thousands of tiny, repetitive grooves into a panel before a single drop of paint goes down is slow, exacting work. Some of Miao’s pieces stretch seven feet across. That kind of scale only happens through sustained, patient attention, which is exactly the state of mind his Mindfulness series is named for. The technique and the theme are the same gesture.
It’s a good reminder that creativity isn’t always about a sudden idea. Sometimes it’s a very old shape, a lot of small careful marks, and the discipline to keep going until they add up to something that looks like it’s glowing from within.
Spiral of Energy is presented by Whitestone Gallery. More of Jiang Miao’s work is on his Instagram — via Colossal.
