EXILE by Nova Jiang

Nova Jiang, Exile, 2025, oil on panel. Picture: J. Scott.

RECORDED SYLLABLE is the title of an exhibition by Nova Jiang at CHAPTER NY, Walker Street, New York. Taken from Macbeth’s haunting phrase, “to the last syllable of recorded time,” the exhibition considers the symbolic trace of memory left behind in the passage of time. In Exile (2025), Jiang paints an arrangement of cut Camelias displayed in an anamorphic vase, beside a sketch of a fractured vase. Painted with quiet precision, the vase evokes a sense of suspended time and accumulation of memory—its flowers poised, a life lived, its painted surface intimate yet estranged. The title Exile frames the vase as a subject in transit, a figure of displacement, no longer at home in its symbolic function. It is not a domestic ornament, but a mnemonic device—a placeholder for a lost origin. This setting does not depict a vase—it theorises it. In Lacanian terms, the vase becomes a staging of objet a, the elusive kernel of desire that structures the subject’s relation to loss. Jiang’s painting does not offer resolution; it offers a symbolic terrain where the viewer’s desire is activated by what cannot be named. The floral motif, rendered with restraint, becomes a cipher for longing—a trace of the Real that resists full representation. Exile is not a painting of a vase; it is a painting of the psychic architecture that surrounds it.

J.J.S. - August 2025