Tongji Philip Qian: if i may

Installation view of Tongji Philip Qian: if i may at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, 2026, photo by Esme Graha

By ESME GRAHAM February 19, 2026

A mint—or perhaps seafoam—green wall at the end of a long room on the top floor of the Chinese American Museum of Chicago marks the entrance to Tongji Philip Qian’s exhibition if i may. When I visited, the bright sunlight of a winter afternoon cast haloes around the works on wood and paper, emphasized further by artificial shadows painted beneath them in the same light green. EN III, which depicts two sun-like spheres emerging from a window of a white wall-mending agent, sits between two windows and mirrors the light peering out from behind the snowy clouds. In this space, Qian’s materials—sandpaper, drywall, spackle, and found paper menus—seem sublime. 

Installation view of Tongji Philip Qian: if i may at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, 2026, photo by Esme Graham

In Qian’s work, language is latent. Because the words are written atop each other until they are illegible, it is the act of writing rather than what is written that emerges. Qian depicts the process of recording or documenting, not what has been recorded or documented. This emphasis on the act of writing can be seen clearly in QM I, a drawing on paper, which appears to be a gridded ledger cropped diagonally. The grid is filled with graphite markings that seem to be words, but any actual letters, and thus any explicit meaning are illegible. Along the edges of the grid Qian has repeatedly written a cursive word or phrase, which, upon closer inspection, is nearly identical on each line. It is clear then, that these are not simply placeholders for language, but are rather meticulous inscriptions. QM I and its companion QM II transcend the specificity of language and rather become meditations on its laborious act, the process of depicting the process. Here lies the writer’s challenge: how should I use language to describe a practice that transcends the specificity of the written word? 

Installation view of Tongji Philip Qian: if i may at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, 2026, photo provided by CAMOC

Surroundings is a series of “found paper” affixed directly to the wall with gold pushpins, which directly addresses what remains (or emerges) when language is erased or obscured. The papers included in the work are printed menus from different restaurants. There are clues to the types of cuisines—an image of the Eiffel tower, a photograph of egg rolls—but the language of the menu is covered by cross-hatchinged grids of graphite and pigment marker. What is not there seems just as present as what is. This intervention is a form of “redaction,” but it is not a reductive practice. Rather, it seems to generate new ways of looking at detritus of the everyday: what is a menu-shaped space?

Installation view of Tongji Philip Qian: if i may at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, 2026, photo provided by CAMOC

Curator Larry Lee’s statement compares Qian’s practice to On Kawara and Teching Hsieh and their examinations of the “daily grind.” Indeed, if i may foregrounds the act of process. Daily life is captured through graphite scrawls on the corners of old mail or, indeed, old menus. In this exhibition, however, something sublime emerges from those quotidian tasks. Perhaps we can start to track our days through menus, or redact and cross-hatch this review and see what appears.

Tongji Philip Qian

if i may

Curated by Larry Lee

Chinese American Museum of Chicago

11 January - 22 February 2026