Part documentation of real scenes, part fading memories, and part figments of my imagination, this painting is from a series exploring the ambiguity in identity and home as relevant to today’s internationally mobile lifestyle, within the landscape genre.

It is the end for the individual flower when it falls from it’s spike, but the plant continues to grow, hopefully producing a new single flower the following year.

Each direct print is a one-of-a-kind record of the flower just at the end of it’s life, from a single Paphiopedilum plant, nurtured at Atelier do Tijolo. As such, this project is slow in it’s developmental stages and only produces, at most, two unique prints a year. Additional sketches and studies may be produced from the plant during the flowering season.

This collection of works in oil are all painted en plein air. I am still in the very early days of exploring and learning Portugal as my currently home and painting en plein air sets aside time to get to know the land, the climate, and sometimes the people.

I slipped away to Madeira Island for a week during the pandemic to immerse myself in the mystical laurisilva forest. I returned brimming with inspiration and hundreds of reference photos and immediately threw myself into painting three medium canvases. These three paintings hold a special place in my heart as they mark the beginning of the Abstract Fantasy Landscapes series.

As I side-stepped from the From Nothing series, I began reworking some miniature studies. My focus was on reimagining current realities whilst still retaining some historically embedded ideas and concepts. On a personal level they explore the transition of moving countries, and in the current times they explore the changes to our lives as a result to the pandemic. As the world springs into bloom, so our perspective shifts accordingly.

All of the paintings were started in 2020 and left for over six months before returning to them and reworking, embedding the passage of time into their development. Particularly notable was a shift from dark colours and smoothly shaded shapes into increasingly brighter colours and graphic patterns. As the series develops into larger formats new challenges arise and spark more shifts and changes.

And so life (and this series) continues.

Painting from observation is where I begin researching and studying my subjects. From portraits to still to painting en plain air, observing nature is at the core of my art practice.

Beginning during the Jan lockdown in Portugal, I began the From Nothing, 2021 series, 100 A4 paintings on paper, while unable to explore the beautiful country I had moved to. The process of working within a constrained format meant I had to push my creativity with very limited external inspiration. Similarly to painting within a consistent and smaller format, being in confinement meant an adjustment in my ideas of space and daily routines, with unknown consequences. This series began as a challenge to continue my art practice during an altered reality and represents a view into my internal world during a specific, possibly identifying, moment of time.

Isolated from the outside world, I was guided by my thoughts and memories to create a diagrammatic and symbolic language to tell what was a primarily internal story. I drew from previously explored ideas to consider altered perspectives, where ambiguity and duality, memories and reality, and differing interpretations are able to sit harmoniously together as one sequence. When looking at the series in chronological order, the works become a mirror to an inner process over a specific period of time: with some logical progression, side shifts, consistencies and inconsistencies, and change.

Much like in dreams, repetition of visual elements across different paintings indicate some continuity over time, yet the juxtaposition of dissonant styles show that the mind often jumps around in unexpected ways. Although this installation is organised chronologically, one could imagine different interpretations should the individual paintings be arranged based on another system, suggesting that a simple change in the sequence could tell a completely different story.

Thus, upon viewing the installation, the viewer becomes inherent in the interpretation, with their brain focusing on and noticing different elements in a particular sequence. This series then becomes not only a transparent view into one artist’s internal process in its chronological form, but also has the possibility of telling the story of each viewer’s internal process as they interpret and sequence the different images from their own perspective.

*Prints from this series are available as a triptych in my online print shop, please visit https://jenchau.art/product/the-from-nothing-series-custom-triptych.

In 2020-2021, confinement became the way of life which brought communities together. In the UK, neighbours began organising socially distanced cocktail hours in their front gardens and relied on each other for information and sometimes groceries. I missed most of it as we were moving to Lisbon. On arrival in Lisbon I found a similar neighbourly atmosphere. Our new neighbours welcomed us with open smiles and even small gifts. In an area with a large population of elderly people, an understanding of the need for companionship and care seems to be paramount. As such, this series is the beginning of an ongoing collection of little stories about my neighbours with whom I have forged new relationships, and through them, a feeling of home.

Underlying our desire to communicate authentically we can consider artworks to be able to present ambiguous and complex elements from our unconscious, going far beyond the precision of verbal communication. As we each examine the areas of significance in our own lives, the symbolic and conceptual references in our art help place our individual experiences into a context that is more universally understood.

The Conversation Series explores the spaces between two minds, our human limitations and those of language when discussing big topics. I began with the dark, negative space between the two minds then used an interplay of depth, flat graphics, and ambiguous overlay of positive and negative spaces to convey the varying complexity of communications we have everyday.

Life interrupted by Covid-19 has meant that streams of thought from my previous paintings have been interrupted and shifted. On the first day of lockdown in the UK in 2020, I found myself unsettled, fragmented, and unsure about how to proceed. The paintings I had been working steadily on were on the other side of London and our loft had become a computer station. I spent half the day creating a home painting space and then managed to produce ‘Covid-19 Isolation (Day 1)’, (2020).

Why do we remember the past and not the future? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us?’
- The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli.

And there’s nothing like a lockdown to help turn oneself to the books for inspiration... At the time I was researching Astrophysics for an Arts and Science magazine I was working for. I had been introduced to Carlo Rovelli, and time and space seemed to be such an appropriate theme to ponder.

Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, 1915 was exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2015. At the time I was running Art Psychotherapy groups for adults with enduring mental health difficulties, and I was interested in paintings that appeared void of the artist. I began by looking at Mark Rothko’s colour fields and painting swathes of layered colours before I came across Malevich’s Black Square painting.

At first I felt his Black Square was the ultimate void. I wanted a light-absorbing black paint that could best convey a void: I used Stuart Semple’s Black 2.0. Not just because of its ability to symbolise the chasm between the demands of the protestors and the position of the government, but because it’s inception echoes another conflict. He developed it in opposition to Anish Kapoor buying the exclusive rights to Vantablack (developed to be used inside telescopes) to prevent anyone else access to it.

However, upon learning the context of Malevich’s rebellion against the official Socialist Realism genre, Malevich’s Black Square was now paradoxically laden with symbolic significance. A hundred years on, pro-democracy protestors in my childhood home of Hong Kong, wearing ‘uniform’ black, rebel against imposition by another communist government.

In May 2018, I rented a campervan and drove solo through California for three weeks. I was returning to a place I once called home, the Golden State, the very symbol of the American dream. But it was not nostalgia that brought me back.

The Californian wildfires of 2017 which razed to the ground the lives and dreams of thousands had me enraptured and feeling a connection to California that I thought was lost. Reading news of the Thomas fire reignited my memory of the people and places in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles that were part of my life for eleven years. I later realised it was also the geographical home for the part of me that identified as an artist – something that I had abandoned for other opportunities, more than ten years ago.

These fires whose destructive forces ended so much for so many have been a catalyst for reconnection with my artistic side and as I travelled through the scorched landscape, they sparked the growth of a new creative direction for me.

These paintings represent that beginning.

The Unknown Series was made during a time when I was interested in processes that relinquish control in favour of exploration and discovery. They also mark the period during which I was studying Jungian Art Psychotherapy, when much of my conscious was preoccupied with finding what emerges from the unconscious.

These images both evoke imagination about what the final image is of, as well as keeping in the mind in a space of perceptual curiosity.