Xiao Jiang’s minimalist scenes of life, childhood, and the mundane have traveled from Shanghai to Los Angeles. Chinese landscape painting is ruled by tradition. The depiction of mountaintops, for instance, projects a higher, more divine realm of thought—a break from the quotidian. Perhaps because Xiao grew up in the Jinggang mountains, he visits this altitude time and time again in works such as Mountain After Mountain, Scenery at the Summit, En Route, and Departure. In some paintings you see the peaks, in others you don’t. —Henry McGrath