NORITO is pleased to present Eve Yifan Jiang's first UK solo exhibition, Post-Edenic, on the occasion of London Gallery Weekend.

“Temperament determines material; material reshapes temperament,” says Eve Yifan Jiang.

Trained in Western academic oil painting from a very young age, Jiang later encountered Gongbi (traditional Chinese meticulous painting), a formative experience that ultimately shaped her practice and led her to adopt ink on silk as her primary medium. Unlike more forgiving techniques, ink on silk permits little revision: once made, each mark remains permanently exposed. The process entails a degree of sustained vigilance which, over time, has turned Jiang into an extraordinarily cautious painter. Since relocating to London, her practice has evolved even further: silk has become Jiang’s second skin, stretched directly onto wooden supports, leaving its translucency exposed. Such a mode of painting, requiring the artist’s near-total absorption, has resulted, for Jiang, in a constant state of tension in which control and vulnerability remain the common denominators. It is from within this tension that Jiang’s practice emerges; an internal tête-à-tête with her chosen medium, at once beloved and resisted, threading carefully around/at odds with the inevitability of her own error.

Jiang’s earlier works heavily reference the subjects and compositions of Western academic painting, such as Greco-Roman mythology and biblical narratives. Works like Eve and I (2024),Sleeping Venus (2025), and Susanna at her Bath (2025) revisit this kind of imagery, in a negotiation between the Chinese tradition of ink on silk and the canons of Western art history. In Post-Edenic, this referential framework finds its anchor in Jiang’s very own introspective landscape, informed by her engagement with psychoanalytic thought. Central to this is Lacan’s Mirror Stage, where the formation of the self occurs through recognition and separation. This condition finds its parallel in the idea of Eden—not as a place, but as a state that is lost upon gaining consciousness. Awakening, in this sense, is inseparable from exile; the moment one becomes aware is the moment they understand that return is no longer possible.