Daniel Chen (b. 1997, Huntsville, Alabama) is an artist currently based in Shanghai, China. He received his B.F.A. in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was awarded the Florence Lief Award. An earnest documentation of a lived life underpins his practice, and exploits abstraction to divert expectations away from the familiar still-life. The intuitive process of painting is built up through individual strokes carrying demarcations of time that oppose the expectation of joy the paintings initially bring from their playful appearance of vibrant colors and combination of painterly languages. The paint is simply functioning as paint – paint as paint, paint as object, paint as communicative, or paint as emotive.
