Crossings Gallery - Yi Cynthia Chen

I forgo the traditional underlayering or planning process, often starting my canvas on a blank slate. I build up my composition by drawing each element in paint as I go. The additive process can include incorporating material such as photography or metal. As I continue to layer new forms, the visual fascia emerges. 

Root systems or emerging stems often connect the dots between my subjects. Although I was the first from my village to be born in America, my family’s roots are Hakka (“Guest Families”) farmers in South China. As so-called “guests,” Hakka farmers had to cultivate arid mountainous regions into fertile farmland. I am deeply inspired by this symbiosis between the persistence of nature and human resilience.  

Therefore, people and plants are often depicted as co-protagonists (or co-villains) in my paintings. Both plants and people have also been labelled as invasive species, and I present nature to grapple with human dynamics of perception and belonging. As I build up my canvas, I add plants and architectural forms to foster conceptual analogies. For example, in my most recent painting Mind Beyond C, the water filter is filtering out the limiting psychological beliefs of the human subject. At the same time, the sprinkler from the water system is nourishing the environmental greenery, and the anthropomorphic ginseng plant that is growing out of her ear. These multiple points of connection allow a process of investigating patterns and relationships and to clarify through-lines between the inevitable contradictions of lived experience. 

Painting became a way for me to remedy or at least represent this transition to understanding, from both individualistic and social perspectives. In creating mind landscapes, I aim to imagine new destinations for our journeys or manifest alternatives in our understanding of collective realities. It is this entanglement of concept that draws me in: the ability for art to earnestly probe at many sides of one story, and in this gradient between transparency and opacity of fact, find a grounding point.