As a second-generation Chinese-American who was raised in California and has spent adulthood in Detroit, Jones has navigated multiple cultural influences. Flowers remain central to her practice. Their presence recalls both the florals of Buddhist temples and a formative moment: witnessing blooms reappear after her first Midwestern winter. Flowers surface in unlikely places, and Jones translates that surprise through shifts in size, composition, and painterly treatment. The perennial — a plant that returns year after year — becomes a metaphor for ritual itself. As Jones notes, perennials function much like inherited habits: they re-emerge, seasonally and cyclically, across generations. Works such as The Last Peony, Heirloom Camellia, In My Shadow, and Water Lilies of Fox Creek anchor the exhibition in this meditation on recurrence and care.

Textiles enter the conversation through Blue Diamonds and Perennial Stars, Jones’s third major quilt painting, following earlier iterations exhibited at the Buffalo AKG Museum and the Dennos Museum. Having had limited exposure to canonical American iconography in her youth, Jones now finds herself drawn to quilt squares, forms distinct from Chinese textile traditions, yet similarly rooted in labor and lineage. Rendered at scale and animated with a subtle illusion of movement, the quilt motif evokes craft, hardiness, and national symbolism, as if a flag were caught mid-billow.

Jones also explores themes of reminiscence, depicting what she describes as “things that move me close to home.” The remains of her family’s early-1990s Shanghainese hairy crab feast — a beloved tradition so cherished that relatives transported the delicacy home in their luggage — appear alongside Coca-Cola and Coors light, suggestive of assimilation. In Seniors, a stately oak tree stands adorned (or trashed) with toilet paper, a familiar rite of passage among American teenagers. 

Elsewhere, Jones considers the shifting nature of memory itself. In This Immense Confusion One Thing Alone is Clear presents a vast grid of packaged cell phone cases, a dazzling matrix of color and surface that reads simultaneously as retail display and brightly patterned abstraction. In contrast, Impedimenta depicts the accumulated detritus of life: stacked file boxes and plastic bins that embody both preservation and burden. As physical photo albums give way to thousands of digital images stored in the cloud, what will constitute the heirlooms of the future.

The exhibition’s final major work, Pricks, portrays a prickly pear cactus carved with the names of young lovers along a favored California walking trail. A plant known for its resilience and healing properties, it absorbs these inscriptions, wearing its scars as record. Across Inheritance, Jones invites viewers to consider what we can preserve and how shared meaning is constructed through repetition over time.

Recent institutional exhibitions or acquisitions include at the AKG Buffalo Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, Detroit Institute for the Arts, Dennos Museum, Henry Ford Cancer Pavilion, University of Michigan Museum of Art, New Britain Museum of American Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Gallery shows and curatorial projects featuring Jones include The Sea and the Sky, You and I, curated by Allison Glenn at The Shepherd, Detroit and Detroit Presents, curated by Amani Olu, at the Season Fair, among others. You can see her public mural work on Instagram @0uizi.

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