We call her “The best cats’ painter in the East”. The characteristics of her works is letting go of the definition or stereotype that cats are just cute. She lives with cats together and paints as they are.
What she says about the technique of “glued color painting”, means the method of fixing the ink or rock painting pigments in glue liquid which can be seen in Japanese, Chinese or Korean paintings as well. As a matter of fact, this technique is invented originally by Japanese. As it is, her technique is quite different from the normal Japanese painting. Her energetic and oriental works developed upon the silk or paper are sharply in contrast with the somewhat ambiguous and soft touch of ordinary Japanese painting. Her color and composition are so powerful that her work has a persuading essential of shining beauty, itself, whether a cat exists or not on a canvas. In other words, her paintings will be appealing to us even in a style of abstract painting without any kind of animal in the composition.
Surrounding her “cat” are full of well calculated carpets and other paintings and she entices us to the ecstatic atmosphere. What we feel like outside light and breeze in her expression, shows us the reality of the room interior sunken in a depth of personal memory.
In actual life she lives with her cats and takes the photos of them and upload them with her little essay on SNS every day. Her simple way of living and cosmos-like expansion of mind in her small world reminds us Kumagai Morikazu, Japanese great painter, who continued to produce many wonderful pieces of art without coming out from his house for about 30 long years. How can be peace of mind obtainable we learn from her writings and paintings.
The reason why Chen draw cats is not because she just loves them, or not also because they are popular. Once she even dared to avoid to draw them. She does not know at first how to empathize with cats, she says. Cats and carpets drawn with sharpened sensibilities caught people’s mind and orders are flooded, but she says humbly “I am still looking for a style of painting.”
We hope you enjoy her new artworks in our booth.
exhibition: ART SOLO 2022 [ 2022/04/15 – 2022/04/17 ]