Exhibition Review - Traces: Sigrid Xiyuan Qian at Sasse Museum of Art

Sigrid Xiyuan Qian, Traces. Exhibition view at Sasse Museum of Art, Pomona, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

Sigrid Xiyuan Qian, Traces. Exhibition view at Sasse Museum of Art, Pomona, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

Perception forms the conceptual core of Qian’s creative process. It is not only a sensory response to external stimuli but also a deliberate engraving of phenomena into the mind and body. For Qian, perception extends beyond vision, which contemporary life increasingly depends on. In Trespass (2025), the opening piece of the exhibition, the viewer’s habitual ways of seeing are confronted by rope-like brushstrokes and warped composition. The translucent colors possess enough depth to map through the surface, leading the eyes into an amiable abyss with no exit. The work evokes a childlike sensibility—a chaotic state where the boundaries between inside and outside dissolved. 

Sigrid Xiyuan Qian, Tresspass, oil, oil pastel on Linen, 24* 36 in, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

 “My practice is rooted in a search for spiritual space—not religious, but deeply felt—and shaped by a sense of cultural fluidity.” Qian writes in her artist statement.“Moving between Eastern and Western visual languages and mystical traditions, I merge symbolic forms, recurring imagery, and dream-born architectures to create soft thresholds that hold what language cannot.” She perceives and produces responses to her surroundings through reflexive acts, yet her vital agency remains anchored in touch, smell, and sound. In this sense, explicitness becomes destructive. Qian eliminates narrative clarity, embracing the ambiguity of layered information to create an allegorical utopia of suspended moments. The linearity of time and language is concealed beneath her fragmented yet painterly vocabulary.

In other works, Qian explores spatial awareness. While most people perceive “openness” and “enclosure” as distinct spatial conditions, such boundaries become blurry in her paintings. In Moon Over the Southern River (2024), inspired by one of her dreams, Qian constructs a folding landscape where space loses its quality to be navigated by dimensionality. The viewer’s attention anchors instead on the simple distinctions of up and down, left and right—coordinates arising from the body itself. Through this, the image begins to move, forming a dynamic field of vividly defined yet indistinct structures.  

Sigrid Xiyuan Qian, Moon Over the Southern River, oil, oil pastel, color pencil, organza on, Linen, 36* 48 in, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

The curatorial design underscores the intricacy in her work. The exhibition space is a semi-open cube with two main entrances, allowing Traces to offer multiple points of access into Qian’s world. Leave the Radio On (2024) and the series that follows present a more tangible dimension of her spiritual projection that rooted in social and domestic spaces. These works depict her living environment and personal belongings. Though traces of human presence are removed, they retain an immediate warmth, an instantaneous temperature. If her abstract paintings read like poems that dense with symbolism and open to layered emotional interpretations, these intimate and familiar scenes speak as her native language, perhaps even as dialects. Both her languages are rich and multilayered, prioritizing resonance over transparency or literal accuracy. 

Sigrid Xiyuan Qian, Leave the Radio on, Oil, oil pastel, graphite on Canvas, 36* 48 in, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Since moving to the United States in 2013, Qian has pursued a lifelong artistic journey shaped by the encounter between Eastern and Western sensibilities. Influenced by Western culture, she juxtaposes ancient Chinese religious imagery with Western mythological symbols not through systematic categorization or oppositional logic, but through a unity born of estrangement. Rather than comply with the aesthetics expected of Orientalism, or respond to academic critiques that her work is “too vague,” Qian’s paintings carry a wide-open humanism instead of catering to social expectation, while simultaneously implying the difficulty of erasing Eastern stereotypes. She investigates secret ways to assert authorship through elements drawn from lucid dreams, forming broken yet fluid narratives that link places, histories, and aesthetics. These symbols regenerate and transform continuously, coalescing into mutable forms like fragments in a kaleidoscope.

Sigrid Xiyuan Qian: Traces runs from Nov 16–29, at Sasse Museum of Art (300 S. Thomas St. | Pomona, CA 91766)